IOC SHOWS ITS INTEREST IN RUSSIA’S INTERESTS
Not going for complete doping ban may have displayed its true colours
Anyone looking to understand the IOC’s decision to spare the majority of Russian athletes — unofficially 271 men and women, as Russian Olympic officials were allowed to announce — and let them compete in the Rio Olympics might look to a beloved quote about Russia from the former British PM Winston Churchill.
Speaking in a 1939 wartime address on the BBC, what Churchill said was this: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.
“That key is Russian national interest.”
Do the old trick of replacing “Russia” with the “International Olympic Committee” (IOC) and there may be also a key.
The athletes were greenlighted despite a scathing report by London, Ont., lawyer and veteran arbitrator with the Court of Arbitration of Sport Richard McLaren, which absolutely excoriated the Russian government and sports establishment for running a state-sanctioned system to protect its dirty, doping athletes.
That system, McLaren found in his report last month, reached the highest levels (both the deeply implicated Russian sports minister and his deputy were appointed by then-PM Vladimir Putin, now the Russian president).
McLaren, the “independent person” appointed to head the investigation by the World AntiDoping Agency, or WADA, had confirmed allegations of whistleblowers in earlier media reports.
But the “surprise result,” the lawyer said, was the revelation of the extent of Russian state leadership “in processing and covering up urine samples of Russian athletes from virtually all sports” and the “larger picture of Russian doping activity and the sports involved beyond merely athletics (track and field).”
What McLaren called “the Disappearing Positive Methodology” or DPM — which saw positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs made to disappear and be replaced with negative ones — was in use from at least late 2011 to August of last year and “utilized across a range of sports,” from the disgraced track and field, where it was widely employed, to weightlifting, wrestling, canoe, swimming, hockey, football and even, God forbid, curling, the Paralympic sports and table tennis.
DPM was separate and distinct from the urine-swapping for dirty Russian athletes at the Sochi Games, wherein dirty samples were replaced by clean ones taken from the athletes well before. That was accomplished in the wee hours through a purposebuilt “mouse hole” in the wall of the lab that adjoined the offices of the FSB, the Russian Federation Security Service, the successor to the feared KGB.
Implicated in the Sochi exercise and/or DPM were officials from FSB and the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia, employees of labs in both Moscow and Sochi, senior coaches in track and field, doping control officers, staff members of the Russian Olympic Committee and, of course, deputy sports minister Yuri Nagornykh, who from 2011 on was personally advised of every positive drug test and marked most of them “SAVE,” which meant their positive test results were changed to negative.
The report reads like something out of a John le Carré novel.
Upon receiving it last month, WADA immediately asked the IOC to consider banning the entire Russian team from Rio, and has extended McLaren’s mandate to keep on looking.
But the IOC, its president Thomas Bach said Thursday, had to ask itself the question, “Can you hold an individual athlete responsible for the wrongdoing of his country?” let alone “deprive someone of the right to prove their innocence?”
The IOC handed the hot potato back to the international sports federations, albeit reversing “the presumption of innocence” for Russian athletes and requiring them to demonstrate they were clean.
The final decisions were made by a three-member IOC panel — it included former silver medallist fencer Claudia Bokel, chair of the IOC Athletes Commission — with advice from the CAS.
Bach was adamant that the message is very clear: “We want to keep cheaters out of the Olympic Games,” and “there’s no place” for them to hide, and “dopers can never feel safe” because the IOC will hold onto test results for a decade so that suspect athletes can be followed.
It’s a tricky business, weighing what McLaren and others found against the natural law that holds that you cannot answer for a violation of law by someone else.
But one of those other investigators, former lead WADA top cop Jack Robertson, told ProPublica, the independent public interest newsroom, on Thursday that his efforts to investigate Russia’s state-sponsored doping were regularly thwarted by Sir Craig Reedie, WADA president and, you guessed it, IOC vice-president.
In the end, Bach said, wherever one falls on the question, one “has to be able to look into the eyes” of the affected athletes. He said he had.
He wasn’t asked, and didn’t say, if the Russian athletes, coaches and officials had met his purportedly searching gaze.