JOIN USAn opportunity lost
There was a time when Thomas Bach looked exactly like the leader the International Olympic Committee needed.
He championed reforms, including one streamlining how cities bid for the games, and made the entire bidding process cheaper. He advocated gay rights by adding sexual orientation to the IOC's anti-discrimination charter, doing so just in time for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a country that had instituted anti-gay laws leading up to those Winter Games.
Bach, a German who won a gold medal with the West German fencing team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, seemed as if he would be a stalwart of a president who would fight for athletes' rights because, after all, he had been one.
But where was Bach's leadership Sunday, when the IOC announced that it would not bar the Russian Olympic Committee and would not bar Russian athletes outright from the Rio Games, despite overwhelming evidence of state-sponsored doping?
Instead of using the power of the IOC to stand up to Russia, a nation whose highest sports officials have been implicated in a doping programme that lasted at minimum from 2011 to 2015, Bach withered. He dropped the Russian case into the laps of the 28 international sports federations with the Rio Games less than two weeks away.
Now those federations must rule -- and rule quickly -- on the cases of individual Russian athletes who will appeal to them for inclusion in the games. Already, just hours after the committee's announcement on Sunday morning, the International Tennis Federation said the eight Russian players who wanted to compete in Rio were good to go.
That was fast.
Bach could have set a strong example for nations who dare to cheat on the playing field as boldly and as defiantly as Russia did. But he failed, and in so many ways, too. As a leader. As a voice for clean sports and clean athletes. As someone expected to keep his word.
Is this the same Thomas Bach who -- within just the last year -- preached that the IOC has "zero tolerance" when it comes to "doping and any kind of manipulation and corruption"?
Is this the same Thomas Bach who just last year said the Olympic anti-doping system had to be overhauled and made entirely independent from nations and sports federations because it would send a message of good governance and transparency? Because doing so would "better protect the clean athletes and enhance the credibility of sports"?
Maybe by zero tolerance, Bach meant zero consequences? Or maybe he meant zero tolerance, starting not immediately, but in 2017?
With the Olympic committee's decision Sunday to punt its responsibility, it gave sports federations the power to decide which Russian athletes are clean, and which are not. Yet isn't that kind of how the IOC got into this problem in the first place?
Russia was in charge of most of the testing of its own athletes and managing the results of its own athletes' failed tests. Not a good plan: Russia made the system look like a joke when it made failed drug tests look clean.
What makes Bach and the Olympic committee so sure that sports federations will not do the same? Those federations are rife with conflict of interests and biases, which is commonplace in international sports governance. And now justice will be served piecemeal.
Within those 28 sports federations, some might make sound decisions that protect honest competitors. Others might make terrible decisions.
However it turns out, as the chaos unfolds with athletes preparing to head to Rio, Bach has stomped upon a group of good people in the Olympic movement: clean athletes and whistle-blowers.
Whistle-blower Yuliya Stepanova, a middle-distance runner, had doped under the Russian system and served a ban. But her evidence helped reveal this whole Russian doping mess, and now she must wonder if her brave efforts -- and those of her husband, Vitaly Stepanov -- to expose a dirty system were for naught.
Bach must know, after all of his years in the Olympic movement, that people like the Stepanovs who are on the inside of the system are the most valuable in exposing corruption. If he does not know, he certainly should not be in charge.
Yet Bach said Sunday that Stepanova would not be able to compete in Rio under a neutral flag, or any flag, for that matter. That she could be an observer as a guest of the Olympic committee instead.
The rationale: "It puts this contribution into the perspective of Mrs. Stepanova's own long implication, of at least five years, in this doping system and the timing of her whistle-blowing, which came when the system did not protect her any longer."
What the Olympic committee failed to say was that Stepanova has risked her life, her livelihood and the safety of her family to break open perhaps the biggest cheating scandal in the history of the Olympics. Yet for that, she does not get to run again -- she gets a spot in the IOC's suite at the opening ceremony, where there will be a buffet and open bar?
"This decision and the lack of a firm, clear decision by the IOC was a blow to the effort of clean athletes, and it sends a message that we don't want whistle-blowers," Travis Tygart, chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, said Sunday. "This is not the decision that clean athletes expect. Or that clean athletes deserve, right?"
But enough about whistle-blowers and clean athletes. Because the decision clearly was not about them.
It was, however, a good example of Bach's precipitous fall from strong leader to weak one.
In 2014, Minky Worden, director of global initiatives for Human Rights Watch, called Bach "a breath of fresh air" in the Olympic movement.
Last week, the German newspaper Bild called him something entirely different atop a photo of Bach with Russia's president, Vladimir V Putin.
The headline was: "Putin's Poodle."
‘IOC more concerned about protecting itself’
Russian whistleblower Yulia Stepanova and Vitaly Stepanov, who helped uncover the biggest doping scandal in decades has said that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is more concerned about protecting the organisation than ridding world sport of drugs cheats.
A day after the IOC rejected a request by his wife, former Russian drugs cheat Stepanova, to run in the Rio Games as an independent athlete, Vitaly Stepanov said an invite to attend the Rio Games as spectators felt like they were being bought.
"My personal view, from the communications we had with people from the IOC, those people had no interest in clean sport," Stepanov said in a telephone interview.
"I got the impression the only thing they cared about, even the person from the ethics department, is protecting the IOC as an organisation."
Stepanov, who previously worked for Russia's anti-doping agency, and his wife helped expose the doping scandal which threatened to exclude Russia from the Olympics.
The couple now live in an undisclosed location in the United States, fearful for their lives.
Stepanov said the invitation to travel to Rio to watch the Games left them cold. "I felt like, 'Are you trying to buy us?'" he said. "Is that how IOC treats whistleblowers? Make them quiet by giving them IOC accreditation and access to VIP lounges."