Doping ban beginning to hurt

It was easy to feel sympathy for Maria Lasitskene, Darya Klishina and the other athletes from Russia who won medals at the World Athletics Championships without the customary trappings. They were in a form of limbo, not competing officially for their home country, which is still suspended because of a widespread doping scandal.

Instead they were here as “Authorised Neutral Athletes,” which meant they could only watch wistfully — and surely with some resentment — as their rivals wrapped their national flags around their shoulders and took their laps of honour.

“It’s sad when it’s your first medal from the World Championships, and you see the girls who are running with the flags, and you can’t do anything because of the rules,” said Klishina, a silver medalist in the long jump behind Brittney Reese of the United States.

Still, it is important to put the pity in perspective and give credit where it is due. Track and field’s still-beleaguered and once-discredited governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, has made so many wrong calls and choices in its modern history. Its former president Lamine Diack is facing charges of corruption in France.

But the IAAF had the collective guts to suspend the Russian Athletics Federation in 2015 and then, more surprisingly, to maintain that ban for the Olympics last summer in Rio de Janeiro, despite considerable pressure. Since then, the IAAF has had the resolve to stick with the decision until the Russian reform process comes much closer to running its course.

This is all the more laudable because no other international sports federation has seen fit to follow suit, although the Paralympic movement has also maintained its Russian ban.

It has made for quite a contrast this summer. In Budapest last month at the world aquatics championships, the Russian team was officially present and finished third in the medal count with 25. It heard its national anthem repeatedly, as 11 of the medals were gold.

“That’s swimming; we are athletics,” Sebastian Coe, the president of the IAAF, said in an interview last week. “We made a decision that we felt was in the best interests of the sport, and one thing I’m genuinely pleased about is that I believe we are making progress, and I don’t think we would have made that progress had we not taken a tough stance in the first place. And having neutral athletes here is a sign of progress.”

Nineteen Russian athletes competed in London, having become eligible by establishing that they had been subject to credible and consistent testing. That does not make the reality on the ground any less odd. Klishina was the only Russian track athlete authorised to participate in the Rio games, but she still competed for the Russian Olympic team.

In London, the Russians took part as Authorised Neutral Athletes, or ANAs, competed with shoe-company logos on their uniforms but no Russian logos. And when Lasitskene, the only ANA gold medalist and the first neutral athlete ever to win at the worlds, stood atop the podium, the anthem that was played to honour her victory in the women’s high jump was the official anthem of the IAAF.

“I wanted to hear the anthem of my country, but we’ll have a chance in the future,” Lasitskene, who missed the Rio Olympics because of the ban, said in an interview with Russian reporters. “I won’t spend my energy discussing this issue. A lot was already spent on it. There is a result, and this is what matters.”

Clearly, there was no confusion in Russia about which nation had won the women’s high jump, but the message is unmistakable internationally. Russia, in at least one major sports domain, remains rightfully a pariah.

Before these championships, Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president, called the IAAF’s decision to maintain the ban “courageous.” It remains unclear whether Bach’s organisation will demonstrate the same character trait when it comes to next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Beckie Scott, a former cross-country skier from Canada who is chairwoman of the athletes commission in the World Anti-Doping Agency, has said that fining the Russians would not be enough in light of the evidence of state-sponsored doping documented in the 2016 McLaren report, which confirmed a huge cheating scheme at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Two IOC reports on the Russians are due this year. Bach says no decision will be made until all the evidence is in. Coe declined to offer any advice. And the IAAF sticks to its own path.

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“I didn’t describe it as courageous,” Coe said of the IAAF move. “I just said it was a tough decision. I think it was a brave decision, but we didn’t do it on the basis that we were looking to be benchmarked. We did it because we genuinely believed it was in the right interest of our sport.”

It could be said that the federation had no real choice at first, not with the WADA investigation into the Russians initially focused exclusively on track and field. Coe said that in November 2015, the month of the Russian ban, “I’m not sure I had a single sponsor that hadn’t either left or was heading for the hills, so that was quite a tricky moment.”

But the IAAF has certainly had a choice as to whether to stick with the ban this long.

Did Coe expect the IAAF to be a lone wolf?

“I’ve often been a lone wolf,” he said. “That’s not an unusual place for me to be. People who deliver and contribute tend to be lone wolves occasionally, and you live with that.”

It is still hard to believe that Coe, a longtime vice president at the IAAF before he was elected president in 2015, had no direct or indirect knowledge of the corruption Diack is accused of. But that is the story Coe is standing by.

Coe is also showing some of the same persistence and staying power that he did when he was setting middle-distance records and defying pressure from Margaret Thatcher, then the prime minister of Britain, to to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

“There has been real change,” said Andreas Thorkildsen, a former Norwegian star who won world and Olympic titles in the javelin and is now part of the IAAF athletes commission. “I wouldn’t still be involved if I didn’t believe in what Seb is doing.”

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The ban on Russia, a big country with a long history of track and field success, comes at a cost. At this stage, the IAAF, as it fights for relevance and audience share globally, needs all the major markets it can get.

That includes the US, whose 30 medals in London were its most in a World Championships and led the medal count by a huge margin a reflection of Russia’s fall and Jamaica’s struggles. But the sport remains a niche diversion in the States. Not so in Britain, where nearly 10 million watched BBC coverage on Saturday night and where the championships set an attendance record, with more than 705,000 tickets sold over the 10 days.

The legacy of the 2012 Olympics played a role. So did the British taste for major sports events and the combined star power of Usain Bolt and Britain’s Mo Farah, who were bidding a form of farewell.

But replicating the packed stands and nightly buzz of London in Doha, Qatar, at the next world championships in 2019 is probably going to be too much to ask. Russian athletes will surely be there. Will Russia?

“I hope it doesn’t take another year or two,” Coe said. “But I haven’t ever put a time frame on this. It will be when the task force comes back to our IAAF council and says, ‘This is what we set out to do; these are the changes they have met.’ And it will be for the council to decide.”

For now, the only runners who can win races at the world championships with “Russia” on their clothing are people like Vladimir Ivanov, a Russian journalist in London who finished first in one of the heats of the news media race.