EXPEL ALL OF TEAM RUSSIA
IOC must ban rogue nation in its entirety from Rio and not just their corrupt athletes
They must take what Dick Pound refers to as the nuclear option
RUSSIA is a rogue regime; a one nation axis of evil, corrupting and subverting all it touches. The sport, the politics, the medium, the message: the last week has demonstrated the many ways Russia poisons the well. And the IOC? We are about to discover where they stand. They have said they will support the IAAF decision to ban Russian athletes from the Olympic Games. They must go further than that. They must take what former WADA chief Dick Pound refers to as the nuclear option.
On July 15, Professor Richard McLaren will deliver his report into the alleged corruption of the testing process at the Sochi Olympic Games. Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, has explained how he would open supposedly tamper-proof bottles and replace known dirty Russian samples with clean ones. He did this, he says, with others including a member of Russia’s secret police, while under instruction from the ministry of sport and with the knowledge of some athletes.
If McLaren confirms this is true, that should be enough to exclude Russia in its entirety from the Olympics.
Some believe it will be too late by then, just three weeks before the Rio de Janeiro Games begin. Nonsense. It would not matter if the report dropped midway through the opening ceremony; that would still leave enough time to tell Team Russia to keep smiling and waving and jog straight out of the stadium entrance and home. You know, like that Russian athlete did mid-race, when she heard the testers had arrived at her meeting.
Individual organisations may not be brave enough to make a stand — the governing body of swimming, FINA, are dragging their heels over positive tests for meldonium, for instance — but the IOC can overrule them all. They know, as we all know, that this is not a scandal that stops at the track.
It affects Russian swimmers, tennis players, cyclists, male and female rugby players, weightlifters, ice hockey players, speed skaters, wrestlers, volleyball players, footballers — such a diverse list of sports that assumptions can be made about the rest, too.
Rune Andersen, head of the IAAF task force into Russian doping, said he would be sharing his evidence with other administrators. ‘Who believes only track and field?’ he said. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
Andersen’s insistence is that as bad samples were replaced by good ones, no pass given by the Russian anti-doping agency is valid. ‘One, two, five or 100 negative tests does not mean an athlete is clean,’ he explained. His report — leading to a unanimous executive vote of 24 against Russian participation — spoke of a culture of non-co-operation and interference.
Dirty samples disappeared, the evidence always had to go through Moscow and would come out the other side with different paperwork, as if intercepted by customs officials.
Andersen’s conclusion was that only those operating outside the Russian regime, in another country, and therefore undergoing independent tests, could be considered clean. Their numbers can be counted on one hand.
‘This is a violation of human rights — I consider this to be discrimination against Russians,’ bleated pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva (below). Yet the IAAF are not discriminating against Russians, but the Russian system. Anyone that is part of it cannot be presumed innocent, no matter what the results say.
The IOC hold an Olympic Summit tomorrow and have already stated they support the IAAF ban.
‘The IOC will initiate further far-reaching measures in order to ensure a level playing field for all the athletes taking part in the Olympic Games,’ they said.
But soundbites are the easy part. There is no evidence, in any discipline, that Russia cares for compliance. What makes the WADA report so damning is that the doping is plainly not limited to athletics and the cover-up does not stop with sport.
The evidence spans an entire culture, taking in government, bureaucracy, coaches, local officials — a rotten network of deception and obfuscation. There is no injustice for clean Russian athletes because Russia has made it impossible for us to know if any exist within their system.
Peter Pomerantsev, born in the United Kingdom to Russian parents, spent more than a decade in Moscow as a television producer and wrote a book about his experiences.
The title is illuminating: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. It explores a side of modern Russia that has been seen at football’s European Championship: an ever-fluid agenda that suppresses truth beneath self-interest.
Russia says and does whatever suits in that moment, regardless of its previous actions. On hooliganism, Russia went from denial to condemning it as part of a damage limitation strategy, to conjuring it as a British smear campaign and formally complaining to the French ambassador to Moscow, before then mixing all of these conflicting stances, as President Putin did on Friday.
‘The fighting between Russian fans and English, that is a disgrace,’ he told an economic forum in St Petersburg. ‘But I truly don’t understand how 200 of our fans could beat up several thousand English.’
His audience duly applauded. In one sentence, Putin contrived to condemn hooliganism, yet paint Russians as the hard men of Europe.
Some believe the violence is as good as state sponsored, too, all part of Putin’s hybrid war with the west, given the connections of some of the influential fans.
Meanwhile, the truth, like the collateral damage, leaves on a stretcher. Last week, a troll Twitter feed, Forest Echo News, which purports to be a British news agency, was seized upon by the Russian media, who republished its fake accounts of the violence in Marseille to show how England supporters started it with provocative comments about ‘Putin stealing the Crimea’.
How would they alight on this ridiculous and obscure social media ghetto, without direction?
So the Russians aren’t just into systemic cheating, but systemic smear campaigns, systemic propaganda, systemic vested interest writ large. One moment they are the bullies of the world — ‘well done, lads, keep it up,’ one of their politicians told the hooligans after Marseille — the next its piteous victims. ‘We are being accused of something we didn’t do,’ grizzled Isinbayeva.
At the European Championship, team doctor Eduard Bezuglov wondered whether Russia are being tested more than other countries. ‘I say this because the Russian national football team has never had a single problem like this in the whole history of Russian football,’ he insisted.
This is untrue. In 2004, Egor Titov tested positive for bromantan and was banned for 12 months after a play-off match with Wales. And Russia’s current squad has two players, Sergei Ignashevich and Aleksei Berezutski, who tested positive and were banned following a Champions League match for CSKA Moscow against Manchester United in 2009. The coach of CSKA Moscow was current Russian manager Leonid Slutsky.
Russia see themselves as victims of a western conspiracy — the only Russian questioner of IAAF president Lord Coe at Friday’s press conference was shrill and very agitated, and asking whether the decision was ‘honest’ and did not contain ‘politics’.
Yet making her best guess of how many doped within the Russia team, discus thrower Evgenia Pecherina — now banned for 10 years after two positive readings — torpedoed the idea that significant numbers inside the domestic programme could be clean. ‘Most of them, 99 per cent,’ she said. ‘You can get absolutely everything the athlete wants.’
WADA’s report on their testing experiences in Russia between February 15 and May 29 contains alarming detail.
The competitor who fled through the media area, rather than take a test; two cyclists who had not been seen at their stated whereabouts location for more than a year and, when cited for missed tests,
retired. On it goes. There was a boxing training camp where officials initially refused to provide a list of athletes present and, worn down, delayed presentation of the documentation for an hour.
Meanwhile, 15 athletes at the Russian National Walking Championship either did not start, withdrew or were disqualified — and six had whereabouts details that did not list Sochi, where the event was held.
As for the 2016 Russian National Greco-Roman Wrestling Championships and the Weightlifting Championships, these went untested being held in closed cities where foreigners are not allowed. It’s an old trick. WADA say Russian athletes frequently give closed cities as their whereabouts, knowing outsiders are not permitted entry.
On other occasions, the locations of events are kept deliberately vague, with only a region provided, not a specific city or location. In a country of Russia’s size, that is problematic. The Sakha Republic in the far east of the country, for example, has three time zones and is slightly smaller than India.
One biathlete was tested 35 times between 2012 and 2016 but always out of competition, at training. When independent testers turned up at his home, he expressed total surprise. Testers were intimidated and followed, their documentation disputed and the National Freestyle Wrestling championship in Yakutsk had its own testing equipment on site, with athletes visiting freely to discover how they might fare if confronted with the real thing. One presumes they could then withdraw if the risk was too great.
How have we got to here? How has this corrupt and corrupting nation been allowed to hold such influence, to operate as a rogue entity unchallenged for so long? Andersen estimated this is a problem stretching back decades.
Yet between 2006 and 2018, no less than seven international tournaments carrying the IAAF’s name have or will be held in Russia; plus the world swimming championships; plus football’s 2018 World Cup. And while this indulgence continues, sport is twisted and subverted, used as a warped propaganda machine to elevate a culture built on systemic deception.
In a period when Russia was supposedly cleaning up its act, WADA investigators recorded 736 tests where athletes were unavailable, 111 whereabouts failures and 52 failed tests, including 49 for meldonium. This isn’t just a matter for athletics. The IOC must do its job come July and cleanse Rio of an entire nation’s worth of pollution.