Bruce Arthur

IOC passes the buck on banning Russian cheats,

It’s not so much that the International Olympic Committee cut the baby in half as they gave the baby to somebody else, and asked them to decide whether to cut it in half. They knew they would, of course. But still, it’s easier when it’s somebody else’s decision.

On Sunday the IOC refused to impose a blanket ban on Russia for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, despite comprehensive allegations of state-sponsored doping from the World Anti-Doping Agency. Instead, they announced that every sport’s international federation will make the decision on a sport-by-sport basis, and added that Russian athletes who had served previous doping bans were ineligible. On the surface, it seemed like a craven, supine, cynical decision. Looking deeper, it still looked that way. Some things are simple.

But for the purposes of fairness, let’s assess this while ascribing the best of intentions, which we have no reason to do, really. We’re just sunny that way.

Maybe the IOC genuinely worried about how to protect clean Russian athletes.

Maybe they read a recent open letter from Russian hammer thrower Sergej Litvinov, who laid out in detail how he believes in clean competition. Maybe they worried that to suspend all athletes would be to sacrifice innocents. The IOC was under significant time pressure, in no small part because WADA delayed this investigation for months and years. Those are real issues. Maybe this was the best they could do.

“It is fine to speak about collective responsibility and we are banning everybody,” said IOC president Thomas Bach.

“But at the end of the day you have to be able to look into the eyes of the individual athlete concerned by your decision. I am really convinced of this decision and I am fine with this decision.”

“I think (a ban) is warranted. It’s warranted. Is is feasible? I don’t know. Is it timely? No,” says Canadian kayaker Adam van Koeverden, who has served on the Canadian Olympic Committee’s board of directors. “Pointing a finger at Russia and saying ‘catch the dopers, catch the dopers’ misses the point of the issue, because there are other countries that are cheating.

“They had a choice to be seen as conditionally complicit or a little bit fascist. Obviously, they chose condi- tionally complicit.” He added he did not see the IOC as actually complicit.

But let’s view this with the appropriate cynicism, baked into us by experience. Let’s say you didn’t want to alienate a country with a top-10 population and a top-three podium performance, which drew over one hundred million viewers to the Sochi Olympics within its borders, whose president is one of the most powerful men on earth.

Let’s say that you didn’t really want whistleblowers uncovering statesponsored doping, because it’s messy and forces bigger questions, and leaves open the possibility of future Games without, as previously mentioned, marathoners from Kenya, or sprinters from Jamaica, or China, in the apocalyptic scenario.

If so, you could punt the decision to individual sports federations, who have neither the time nor the resources to determine every Russian athlete’s doping status in 12 days, knowing that FINA, which regulates swimming, gave Vladimir Putin its top honour in 2014. Or that fencing is run by a Russian billionaire. Or that the expectation is that a strong majority of Russia’s Olympic team, which finished third in the total medal count in London four years ago, will be in Rio.

Not only that, but you could craft a solution that violates the WADA code by disqualifying Russian athletes who have previously served a doping ban — this idea was crushed during debates over doping policy in 2011 and 2012, when the idea of lifetime Olympic bans was discarded — and which neatly disqualifies Russian whis- tleblower Yulia Stepanova from Rio.

You could then invite her and her husband, both of whom literally risked their lives to expose Russia’s doping system, as your guests, as if that made up for anything. And you would say, as Bach did, “With regards to Mrs. Stepanova, I think it will be an encouragement for all future whistleblowers,” just as you would say the decision “is also encouragement for clean Russian athletes.” You would imply that Russian athletes can prove that they are clean, and can therefore compete, because the Olympic movement — which has now caught 98 athletes in retesting from the Beijing and London Games, including dozens of medallists — is predicated on the illusion that we can tell.

The bar, then, has been set. To be banned from an Olympics as a nation you must do more than Russia, or perhaps be less powerful than Russia. You can run a state-sponsored doping system that is directed from high levels of governments, over multiple Olympics, on multiple levels of multiple sports. If China does this, or the United States, or any true Olympic and world power, then the path has been laid, and lit. The show goes on.

It emerged this weekend that the athletes village in Rio is beset by bad plumbing and faulty wiring; the Australian delegation has refused to move in, and the early reports make Sochi’s sandcastle accommodations seem quaint. It would be easy to make it a metaphor for the Olympic movement as whole, except that in the IOC’s case, the problems reach all the way to the foundation.