Russia is rewarded again and again for cheating
IF THERE was a league table for doping, Russia would be top. In the data given to German TV network ARD/WDR, there were 415 abnormal blood tests from Russian athletes, four times that of any other country.
If these allegations are true, it is a systematic programme across two decades, dating from 2001 to 2012. And how have Russia been treated in that time?
In 2013, Moscow hosted the World Athletics Championships, awarded by the IAAF at a council meeting in Mombasa on March 27, 2007. So, in the middle of the period when we are led to believe the statistical evidence strongly suggested Russia was dirty, the governing body of athletics gave the country their most prestigious tournament.
And not for the first time. In November 2003, the IAAF awarded the 2006 World Indoor Championships to Moscow, too. In 2016, the IAAF World Junior Championships will be held in Kazan.
As for the IAAF Race Walking Cup, look no further than Cheboksary in Russia. No, seriously, don’t. It was held there in 2008 and the IAAF are going back in 2016 and 2018. In 2010, they took it to Saransk in the Volga basin instead; just for a change.
Have we ever tried it another way? Have we ever tried not giving the major tournaments to countries with a dubious attitude to doping control, and seeing what happened?
Swimming’s world championships are currently taking place in Kazan. Since they were awarded, there have been 23 positive tests in aquatic sports in Russia — enough, surely, for the country to be stripped of the honour.
Other pools and cities would have been available, even at relatively short notice. But, no. FINA, the world swimming authority, will afford Russia another opportunity to display its sporting prowess, even though four women representing Russia in the event are confirmed drug cheats.
Natalia Lovtsova, Russia’s best 100 metres butterfly and freestyle swimmer, has served two doping bans, the second of which was due to end in May. When she turned up at the Russian championships in April and set career-best times, it was blithely announced her suspension had been reduced. Still FINA sit idle.
Did China ever suffer from the Ma Junren years when record books were rewritten and, eventually, 27 athletes were dropped from the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for failing blood tests? Hardly. Last week, Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, becoming the first city to hold a winter and summer Games, following its success in 2008.
This month Beijing will host the IAAF World Athletics Championships, China having also held the IAAF World CrossCountry Championships at Guiyang in March. The IAAF Half-Marathon Championships went there in 2010, the IAAF World Junior Championships in 2006, the IAAF World Race Walking Cup in 2014.
Within years of emerging from one of the most serious doping scandals of modern times, China was rewarded with event after event. And we wonder why athletes and coaches think they can cheat with impunity.
Kenya is another country that is greatly tainted by the latest revelations, but where will the IAAF’s World Youth Championships be held in 2017? Nairobi.
Sometimes doping is about individuals, a rogue athlete, a corrupt coach, but when a country is found to have indulged in a systematic programme, when the numbers are overwhelming, that country should suffer. Some would advocate a national ban, but this punishes the clean competitors, too. A ban on hosting, for a good 20 years, sounds fair.
Instead, the IAAF indulges the protagonists — and wonders why cheating proliferates.