Russia's open secret

Doping: Many believe that the latest doping charges should be enough to bar the nation from Rio Olympics

When officials from the New York City Marathon decided against inviting elite Russian runners to compete in the race last fall, they didn’t explicitly say that the cloud of doping over Russia and its athletes was the reason for it.

They didn’t have to. It was obvious.
Accusations of Russian doping and reported claims of systemic distribution of performance-enhancing drugs and of bribes paid to cover up positive tests would be enough to scare off any official from any event worried about safeguarding its credibility.
So you have to wonder what officials from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are thinking now, in light of the article published Thursday by The New York Times that detailed a stunningly complex Russian doping scheme at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

A phantom lab created to process the urine of athletes who had doped. Anti-doping scientists who passed samples through a hole in the laboratory’s wall so they could be replaced with drug-free urine. Years of planning for a surreptitious operation that made at least 100 positive samples disappear, according to the former lab director, and allowed at least 15 Olympic medalists to get away with cheating.

If that isn’t enough reason to deem Russian athletes a risk to the credibility of the Olympics, and reason enough to bar them from competing in this summer’s Rio Games, I don’t know what is. In fact, there are enough red flags that Olympic officials should consider barring the Russians from the 2018 Winter Games, too.

A harsh punishment? Yes. Embarrassing? Surely. But that punishment is proper, and overdue, considering that Russia and some of its athletes have benefited from a state-sponsored doping system that rivals — perhaps even surpasses — those run by Eastern Bloc nations in the 1970s.

It will take time to clean up Russian sports, and that can’t happen in weeks. Or months. Or maybe even years. In the meantime, clean athletes — and, yes, I still believe they exist — shouldn’t have to line up against Russians and wonder, “Is this a fair fight?”

Steven Holcomb, an American bobsledder, won two bronze medals in Sochi, including the first Olympic medal for the US in the sport in 62 years. But when he heard the news about the Russians who had beaten him, he told me it made him feel terrible and angry and upset, all at the same time.

After all, if the report is true, it would mean that he was cheated out of two silver medals in Sochi, and perhaps countless others in previous competitions.

“I don’t feel comfortable going to my next Olympic Games knowing that the Russians will be there because they’ve cheated like this,” he said. “I say, ban them from the sport and the Olympics completely until they can prove that they’ve cleaned up their act and prove that they can be on a level playing field.”

To be clear: Thursday’s revelations didn’t emerge from nowhere. Holcomb, who has dedicated 18 of his 36 years to his bobsledding career, said some Russian athletes had told him that doping should be permissible except on competition days.

Indeed, Russia’s doping problem has been an open secret for years.
Last fall, an independent investigation run by the former WADA president Richard W Pound revealed that Russia’s track and field program was rife with corruption and doping cover-ups. It was enough for that program to be suspended from international competition until it proves that it can follow the rules. A new scandal early this year involving the widespread use of a banned drug, meldonium, by Russian athletes only made it seem as if Russia had no interest in fixing things.

Unfortunately, WADA and the IOC have a record of going soft when dealing with Russia.
While the secret lab was expunging dirty samples in Sochi, WADA’s president, Craig Reedie, was praising Russia’s anti-doping effort. In the wake of yet another round of Russian athletes testing positive, Reedie said it looked as if Russia had improved its anti-doping controls, that perhaps it had learned its lesson. “I always tried to be a glass-half-full man,” Reedie said.

Half-full, even when athletes wrote to him in recent months demanding — begging for — a deeper investigation of Russian sports beyond track and field. Beckie Scott, an Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing and the chair of WADA’s athletes’ advisory council, said Thursday that she and other athletes were frustrated by the ongoing inaction of the bodies empowered to do something to stop Russian doping.

“Nothing happened as a result of that report in November — well, anything significant in the opinion of the athletes,” Scott said. “If there was a collective effort of engagement by the IOC and WADA, and really serious intention by both organizations, things would be different now.”

Like Holcomb, Scott favors barring Russia from the Olympics because, she said, “without actual action like that, how can you be taken seriously?

“You can talk about zero tolerance all you want,” she added, “but the punishment has to fit the crime.”

She’s right. Russia has gone rogue. No more proof is needed. It’s gone to incredible lengths to support (and to hide) its doping program, and there’s no telling what it will do — or, given the unexpected deaths of two high-ranking Russian anti-doping officials within two weeks of each other, what it won’t do — to make this all go away. But the time for WADA and the IOC to play nice with Russia is over, too.

There has to be a price to pay for a country that doesn’t follow the rules. Kenya is in danger of being barred from the Rio Olympics because of the sorry state of its anti-doping program, and its seeming unwillingness to improve it. But what Russia has done in falsifying tests results is surely more devious than not testing at all.

Olympic organisers can’t look the other way anymore. The Rio Games already have enough problems — the Zika virus, political instability, construction delays — that may not be fixed. The very least the IOC can do is address the one right in front of its face, taunting them.