‘STATE-SPONSORED’ CHEATING
’It’s worse than we thought. It’s residue of the old Soviet Union system.’
It would be easy to take the boiling toxic pot of accusations and revelations that rocked sports on Monday and say, ah, good ol’ Russia. It would be almost comforting. Secret agents, state-sponsored doping, a web of corruption that actually affected results on the field — it’s a gold mine of the worst nightmares of sport. It would be easy to say, Russia is the villain here. Russia, in so many ways, makes for a very convincing villain.
The report for the World Anti-Doping Association, whose co-authors include Canadians Dick Pound and Western University professor Richard McLaren, is certainly damning. They say Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, directly ordered the direct manipulation of certain samples; that Moscow’s WADAaccredited lab, headed by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, intentionally destroyed 1,417 samples to avoid detection; that the 2012 Olympics were, in a word, “sabotaged.” The presence of Russian security agents in the testing lab for the Sochi Olympics hangs over those Games, too.
This is, among the annals of cheating, one of the worst scandals ever. In FIFA, the corruption didn’t necessarily change the scores. This did
It goes on, tangled and dirty, and the conclusion is a call to ban Russia from athletics. The IAAF, track and field’s governing body, said it would be considered. It’s possible Russian athletes could be excluded from the Olympics in Rio next year. And the report said, “there is no reason to believe that athletics is the only sport in Russia to have been affected.” This is, among the annals of cheating, one of the worst scandals ever. In FIFA, the corruption didn’t necessarily change the scores. This did.
And that’s where the despair kicks in. Russia appeared to have a state-sponsored doping program in which athletes from the ninth-most populous country on Earth could dope more or less indiscriminately, and couldn’t dominate, but rose to a position of remarkable prominence.
The report said, “This acceptance and, at times, expectation of cheating and disregard for testing and other globally accepted anti-doping efforts, indicate a fundamentally flawed mindset that is deeply ingrained in all levels of Russian athletics. The mindset is ‘justified’ on the theory that everyone else is cheating as well.”
Well, flawed is one way of putting it. Who thinks the Russians are alone? Carl Lewis long ago admitted he failed three tests during the 1988 Olympic Trials — you know, before he won the gold medal that Ben Johnson had to vacate — and they were quietly buried. Lewis also claimed he wasn’t a special case, and that hundreds of American athletes were given the same treatment by the United States Olympic Committee. The East Germans turned bodies into laboratories. This is just the next logical step. Someone just added extortion.
The discoveries, too, can be accidents. BALCO started to unravel when a syringe arrived in the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s mail from a disgruntled sprint coach. One whistleblower in this case was a Russian athlete named Darya Phishalnikova, who was told by the Russian lab she wouldn’t test positive, paid for it, and then tested positive when the sample went to Lausanne. She not only asked for some of her money back, but she sent letters to the IAAF and WADA detailing what had happened. The lesson here, as always: customer service matters.
There are a lot of countries who administer or fund their WADAapproved labs. This is the tip of the Russian iceberg, most likely, and there are surely other icebergs out there, lurking beneath the water. Many will probably never be discovered.
On Russia, Interpol is involved now, so there will be more. The IAAF seems likely to head for the safety of denial, even as FIFA burns, even as its former leadership is mired in its own furious scandal. IAAF president Lord Sebastian Coe, who also headed the London Games, first reacted to revelations of this scandal by calling it a “declaration of war” against his sport, which does not bode well. It’s easy to think that nobody’s clean, on the field of play or off.
The war on drugs in sport is a lot like the war on drugs in the real world — the people trying to catch the villains aren’t ever going to win, and you wonder whether anybody should try. Me, I think they should. There are clean athletes who win, who deserve better. Cyclist David Zabriskie got into cycling to escape his drug-addict father, and broke down in tears when he doped with Lance Armstrong. There are public safety dangers. Kids shouldn’t necessarily look to athletes as role models. But they do. Just part of the deal. The good stuff is worth aspiring to, doomed or not.
Still, this shakes the underpinnings of the sport, like everything else did. It makes you wonder, why bother? You can’t be sure it’s fair; you’re probably sure it’s not. It’s a little like the world that way. Eventually we’ll need something to replace the turn of phrase, tip of the iceberg, because for starters, we could run out of icebergs.
But for now, it works. The word “iceberg” doesn’t appear in the 350-page report. But another flood is coming, eventually.
They never end.