Russia’s breathtaking cheating system

This editorial appeared in The Washington Post:

For millennia, rules have been at the core of athletic competition. Not that they haven’t been broken, but the Olympics still stand for the principle of human striving on a level playing field, or the primacy of rules.

This is why the final report of Richard McLaren’s investigation into Russian doping of athletes, submitted Friday, is so disturbing. The report shows that more than 1,000 Russian athletes competing in summer, winter and paralympic sports were involved in or benefited from coverups of positive doping tests in what McLaren calls a “conspiracy” between 2011 and 2015.

Doping to gain unfair advantage has been a longstanding and serious problem in sport. But the Russians’ wholesale and systemic breaking of rules is on a plane of its own.

What’s astounding is not only the quantity of rulebreaking but the system. According to McLaren, “the summer and winter sports athletes were not acting individually but within an organized infrastructure” that was overseen by the Russian state, including the Ministry of Sport and the Federal Security Service, successor to the Soviet KGB.

The brazen scheme at Sochi that McLaren exposed this past summer, with a “mousehole” through which dirty urine samples were swapped for clean, was part of what became a “well-oiled systemic cheating scheme.” In effect, if any athletes who used drugs to cheat were not protected by various field mechanisms Russia had put in place, they would be shielded from discovery by a “final, fail-safe mechanism” that would transform a positive sample into a negative one. McLaren reports that more than 500 samples that were positive - showing evidence of doping - were simply entered into the anti-doping system as negative; elite athletes had their results “automatically falsified.”

The fallout from the McLaren report is not yet complete; more investigations are underway. But the findings underscore that President Vladimir Putin’s style is to break rules, whether persecuting dissidents at home or making mischief in Ukraine. Putin had to know that his own security services were fixing the Olympics. Fortunately, this time, McLaren has exposed the cheat.