No choice but to ban Russia from Winter Olympic Games
Failure to co-operate with investigations left IOC no choice
In levelling unprecedented punishment on Russia for its statewide doping scheme — banning the country’s Olympic committee from Pyeong Chang 2018 and the use its flag and anthem, and requiring clean Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag — the International Olympic Commission has responded in kind to an unprecedented scandal.
IOC president Thomas Bach said on Tuesday hat the punishment was a “proportional” response given the “unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games,” which is correct, Scott
Stinson writes. There will be complaints from Moscow, of course, about the ban being unfair, part of a Western conspiracy to undermine Russia’s restored standing under President Vladimir Putin, but Russia has had many years to co-operate with anti-drug officials and provide the evidence that would surely exist if this was some kind of U.S.-led scam.
Here is an extraordinarily rare statement that is nevertheless true: the International Olympic Committee has done the right thing.
In levelling unprecedented punishment on Russia for its statewide doping scheme — banning the country’s Olympic committee from PyeongChang 2018, prohibiting the use of its flag and anthem, and requiring verifiably clean Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag — the international body, belatedly, responded in kind to what was an unprecedented scandal.
By now the particulars of the Russian program are well known: a system run through the sports ministry that turned anti-doping scientists into agents performing the opposite role, that identified potential medallists and protected them from scrutiny, and that reached its remarkable apex at Sochi 2014, where Russian police swapped urine samples in the dark of night through a secret hole in the wall.
IOC president Thomas Bach said on Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland, that the punishment was a “proportional” response given the “unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games,” which is correct. The breadth of Russia’s corruption of its anti-doping programs meant no Russian athlete could be trusted to be clean, since one of the scheme’s main pillars was the “disappearance” of positive drug test results.
There will be complaints from Moscow, no doubt, in the coming weeks about the IOC ban being unfair, about it being part of a Western conspiracy to undermine Russia’s restored standing in the world under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, but this line of argument neatly avoids the fact that Russia has had years — seriously, many years — to co-operate with investigating anti-drug officials and provide the exculpatory evidence that would surely exist if this was some kind of U.S.-led scam.
Not long after the first details of the Russian doping program were revealed in a German television documentary in 2014, the World Anti-Doping Agency launched an investigation into its many allegations. (Richard Pound led that commission and Richard McLaren, a fellow Canadian, was one of the members.) That probe was instructive in the way in which Russia chose to respond to the revelations, which is to say they chose not to respond at all.
As investigators and dopingcontrol officers fanned out across Russia to try to get to the truth of the allegations, they were met with an almost universal refusal to co-operate.
WADA’s first independent commission report, published in late 2015, described how dopingcontrol officers would arrive at a hotel known to be a base for a training camp and were told there were no athletes present, even after the front desk confirmed their names. Over and over, Russian athletes told WADA officials that, after the German documentary aired, they were instructed to cease all co-operation with drug-testing officers.
Russia adopted the practice of a blanket denial, and kept that up for more than two years, and through subsequent revelations, both in the media and in the months-long investigations carried out by McLaren at WADA’s behest. It worked for some time, through Rio 2016, when the IOC refused a total ban and said it needed more time to consider the conclusion of the WADA probes.
Other than the many expressions of shock and disgust uttered about the Russian program, one of the money quotes of this story remains the one uttered by McLaren at his Toronto news conference in the spring of 2016, when he was asked why he hadn’t sought more Russian cooperation. We tried that already, he said: “We found that process singularly unhelpful.”
The unexpected part of the IOC’s decision is, as much as it deals a tremendous blow to Russia, preventing it from winning medals in PyeongChang and promising to reallocate those it won in Sochi, it is also a massive blow to the Olympics. Removing the large Russian delegation from PyeongChang makes them an instantly smaller Games.
Beyond that, the unfortunate lesson of Russia’s grand scheme is that anti-drug efforts are likely doomed to be playing from behind. The path for a country inclined to duplicate Russia’s accomplishments is clear: develop a doping program, and deny everything if caught.
Oh, and be wary of whistleblowers. That’s likely the biggest regret Russia has, after all this.