The IOC raises its white flag to doping debate
In any ordinary Olympics, it would be the main event: The International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency at one another’s throats, in the polite way of international sports governance. Two hundred and seventy-one Russians in the Games, after WADA recommended a nationwide expulsion. The IOC blaming WADA for delaying its bombshell report. A former WADA chief investigator saying both sides are complicit, and that anti-doping is a shell game.
It’s just one of the fundamental underpinnings of the modern Olympic movement and its credibility. You know, in theory.
But Rio is an overwhelming thing, like any Olympics but with enough of a different vibe — chill, with metal detector operators not really watching the metal detector screen all the time, and ragged, but in a more chill way than other ragged starts — to overwhelm the senses. How do I get anywhere? Where is there food? How many caipirinhas is too many? There may be no answers.
Meanwhile, the duelling press conferences between IOC president Thomas Bach and WADA director Sir Craig Reedie didn’t attempt to supply real answers. First, Reedie:
“It is not often that sport is confronted with what has come out of Russia over the last 18 months,” he said, before the Games began. “It is really difficult to handle and it puts pressure on the IOC, on WADA, on athletes. It is natural to point fingers.”
Next, Bach, after some fingerpointing, asked if WADA’s annual $30-million budget was enough.
“How big do you want me to go?” he said. “It is too early to take that decision. Every year we are asked to do more with the same funding. Maybe someone will win (the) Euro-Millions (lottery) and give us a spare few dollars. They will think clean sport a good idea, and like to help.”
The IOC, given a two-week window before the Games after WADA’s delays, blamed WADA for its awful decision to allow federations to allow or bar Russia from competing, despite a state-sponsored doping program that made a mockery of international sport, and doping control. WADA shrugged and said, well, too bad. And Pro-Publica’s David Epstein interviewed Jack Robertson, WADA’s chief investigator from 1991 to 2011 and a former DEA agent, about his former employer.
“The action the IOC took has forever set a bar for how the most outrageous doping and coverup and corruption possible will be treated in the future,” Robertson told Epstein.
“Those involved in running sport are former athletes, so somehow I figured that they would have honour and integrity. But the people in charge are basically raping their sports and the system for self-interest.”
Of Reedie, he said, “Craig Reedie, he had to be literally pressured into every investigation. Even the first one, he was reluctant despite the allegations, then the (German broadcaster) ARD documentary forced him into it. And then Reedie sent a message to the Russian ministry basically apologizing that they were being picked on.”
A plague on their houses, in other words, because nobody wants to get all the way to the bottom anyway, and nobody can. The IOC contravened WADA rules by banning Russians with a history of doping from these Games, and conjured up the dream of the truly clean athlete, because they have to. Their world as built would collapse without it, eventually.
These Games will begin Saturday, and athletes will soar. And if history is any indication, in four years or eight, samples will be retested, medals will be stripped and standings resettled, off camera. A certain amount of what was broadcast and written and sent across the world will be proven to have been conducted under false pretenses. It’s how it works now, by evolution and design.
The Russians marched in on Friday night with everybody else. The IOC raised its flag, as it did in Sochi. The game was rigged, sure, but it was so pretty to watch.