IOC OPENS DOOR FOR RUSSIANS
Olympic overlords dance around a complete ban for country’s athletes at Summer Games in Rio
I was at the 1984 Olympics when no Soviet flag flew over Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Nor did the flags of 13 other Eastern Bloc nations.
Their absence tore a huge hole in the very fabric of the Olympic movement. A lot of athletes took home medals they would not otherwise have won.
It was a tilted mess of a Games, swamped by tinged American glories.
If the Russian flag flutters atop the Estadio do Maracana in Rio at the opening ceremonies of the XXXI Olympics 11 days from now, it will be because the spineless Lords of the Rings have prevailed over the sanctimonious vigilantes of sport purity who know damn well there’s no such thing.
Neither side is to be admired. And, as always, athletes are caught in the middle. Some are dirty — not only those from vilified Russia. But the forensic experts haven’t put any other nation under the same microscope that produced last week’s damning report on profound doping vice.
A gerrymandered Russian ban, maybe, and only piecemeal.
The International Olympic Committee, at its emergency session Sunday, danced the fandango around a definitive edict, delegating the decision to individual sports federations that are far from immune to political pressure.
No blanket ban; only a patchwork ban, if that.
Yet, however inadvertently — and the IOC is a coterie of cowardice — the Lords have rescued the Olympics from ruin. Blanket bans are bad. Period. Bans. Boycotts. All cut from the same cloth of agenda righteousness. Have we not learned at least that much?
The Olympics exist within a huge bubble of disingenuity for all that results are measured in milliseconds and millimetres. It is a massive sports carnival, with just as much attendant sports hucksterism. In 1932, a male Polish sprinter passed himself off as female and won gold, the ruse revealed only half a century later when she was shot dead in an armed robbery and her gender discovered at the autopsy.
The public knows there is chicanery afoot, and doping, and collusion. But we buy in to the illusion because it pleases us to suspend cynicism for a fortnight. And because fixing it is often more fraught with undesirable consequences than accepting the margin for fraud. Political intervention only worsens the environment of sports.
Crucifying Russia would have precious little benefit to the Games.
L.A. was tit-for-tat boycott after the United States four years previously forbid its athletes from participating in the Moscow Olympics, in protest over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Twentyone years later, America invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11.
Twenty-five African countries withdrew from the Montreal Games in 1976, infuriated by the inclusion of New Zealand. A Kiwi rugby squad, the famous All-Blacks, had toured South Africa in defiance of a UN call for a sporting embargo against the apartheid state.
South Africa, of course, was Olympics-non-grata following Pretoria’s refusal to integrate the country’s team for the 1964 Games. Not until segregation was formally dismantled was South Africa welcomed back into the IOC family — 28 years of isolation from international sports.
The shunning of South Africa amidst a global boycott of all relations with that country — from diplomatic to economic to trade — was, in my estimation, the sole occasion when a sporting ban has been justified. Their athletes suffered but the big hurt put on Pretoria — though some nations continued to do business with South Africa — cut across the board. It wasn’t narrowly about sports; it was about human dignity and the appalling oppression of blacks, disenfranchised, forced to live in township satellites that were no more than vast miserable ghettos.
There is no similar united front in the culling of Russia from the Olympics as penance over its elaborate state-sponsored state-schemed doping subversion. World capitals, transnational corporations, private and public enterprises will continue to deal profitably with Moscow. Only its athletes will pay. Global denunciation won’t shame Moscow, which remained an IOC member in good standing despite its annexation of the Crimea, a military campaign launched mere days after the Sochi Winter Olympics closing ceremonies.
So spare me the virtuous indignation validating Russia as a sporting pariah because of its byzantine, stunningly perfidious, now welldocumented and confirmed cheating. Collective punishment is never, ever, justifiable, even in so frivolous a dimension as sports. Excluding Russian athletes contains no humanitarian component, as did the boycotting of South Africa.
Somewhere, in all of Mother Russia, there must be at least one clean athlete. Unless the IOC or the World Anti-Doping Agency or Canadian law professor Richard McLaren — whose damning investigation laid out the corruption, the rot, at the core of Russia’s Olympic teams in the past two Games — can prove otherwise, can show that not a single athlete is without sin of taint, then there’s no absolute warranting to bring down the hammer and sickle on everybody.
Just about every country has either been caught cheating or fallen under the shadow of cheating. Sometimes it’s performance juicing drugs, sometimes it’s blood transfusions, sometimes it’s cloak-anddagger manipulation of urine samples. And sometimes, I would add, it’s a national Olympic organization arm-twisting an athlete to stand down from an event — as Canada’s Gilmore Junio withdrew from the speedskating 1,000 metres in Sochi he’d rightfully qualified for so that older teammate Denny Morrison could make a final medal bid (he won silver).
It’s always about winning and playing the angles. Russia took that objective to unprecedented heights of sporting knavery. Then punish its sports bureaucrats and anyone else involved in the collusion, although I can see no way of reaching into the Russian Ministry of Sports for criminal charges. Certainly punish the athletes whose doping malfeasance has been discovered after-the-fact — 312 falsified results, as McLaren’s autopsy concluded, over five years (a time span covering the Sochi and London Olympics), across a wide majority of disciplines.
Want to make Russia and its sports autocrats squirm for the country’s doping conspiracy? Take away the soccer World Cup the country is due to host in 2018. That’s not an IOC decision, of course, and FIFA is arguably the most corrupt sports body on the planet. But Russian doesn’t deserve a glittery sports spectacle to further burnish a reputation founded on fraud.
The Lords at the IOC have a wretched history of never doing the right thing, whether weeding out its own debauched delegates, stifling the greed, or properly acknowledging the Munich Massacre. Don’t look to them for leadership on the quandary of Russia, where the Winter Games were awarded to a summer resort because enough bribery exchanged greasy palms.
Sunday, the IOC deflected the blanket ban proposed for Russia that many have been advocating, pontificating on the one hand that “all Russian athletes seeking entry to the Olympic Games Rio 2016 are considered to be affected by a system subverting and manipulating the anti-doping system,” yet deputizing the hard ban dirty work to individual sports federations in a reverse onus construct — the athletes must convince the federations of their innocence. Within two weeks. When those same federations have proved useless as drug sheriffs in their own sports.
Russia’s track and field team was already suspended by the International Association of Athletics Federations. Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld that decision.
That’s more than 60 Russian athletes who’ve been barred from Rio, meaning a greatly depleted national team.
Finally, what McLaren’s investigation also exposed is the WADA incompetence that has allowed all this cheating to flourish. Let them examine their own entrails before seeking redress for their failings.
Squishing all Russian athletes is just diversionary splatter. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday
The public knows that there is chicanery afoot, and doping, and collusion. But we buy in to the illusion