Given the almost cursed nature of the Rio Olympics, it is difficult to know what kind of a quandary the Games would have found themselves in had Lizzie Armitstead finished on the podium on Sunday at Fort Copacabana in the women’s 141-km cycling road race.
After all what quandary has the International Olympic Committee (IOC) not found itself in the run up to these Games, blighted primarily but not alone by the toxic spillout from the Russian doping scandal?
In the event, Armitstead, the reigning world and Commonwealth champion and a pre-race favourite, finished fifth. It was a difficult race for her, battling with a puncture early on and though she closed in on the leaders towards the end it was not enough – she ultimately finished 15 seconds behind winner Anna Van Der Breggen.
“I have to come to terms with it,” Armitstead later said, though it really is worth wondering whether one can come to terms with what she has undergone as quickly as she claims to have done.
“I can’t pick up the phone to everybody that doubts me and explain myself. The only thing I can do – and the only thing that I’ve always done – is to ride my bike fast and get my head down and control the things I can control.
“I’m looking forward to getting back to the people that love me. You open yourself up for judgment. I never gave up and for that I can be proud of myself.”
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There is a touching sense of duty in that statement to the sport she loves and that is presumably her life, as well as an alignment with the Olympic sense of participation.
There is also a retreat away from some hard truths. For it is precisely the things she can control but did not control which has ended up landing her here in this quandary.
Perhaps it does not matter after all whether or not she did win a medal but that she participated. It is, after all, that which counts in the Olympics.
But then recall that Yuliya Stepanova is not being allowed to participate here.
The former 800m runner-turned whistle-blower on the Russian doping scandal has not been granted permission by the IOC ruling that bars all Russian athletes with past convictions from the Rio Games.
Or even those Russian athletes who may not have tested positive but have been barred by the individual federations of the events they compete in, as per a fumbled IOC decision to deal with the fallout from Russia.
Nobody is saying Armitstead is a doper. But that does not mean that it cannot be argued that she should not have been at the Games at all.
She missed three doping tests, which, at best, is naivety of incomprehensible proportions and should have been enough, under the law as it stands, to ensure she did not race.
She missed the first because the anti-doping official called her mobile phone to no answer ultimately.
She missed the second because of an “oversight” on her part. At this point, she knew that another missed test would mean a ban. Yet in June an unspecified family illness forced her to miss another test.
Compare this with Mo Farah who, having also missed two tests in 2012, became doubly careful to not miss the next one She appealed against the first test and had the ban overturned on a technicality – after having arrived and called her, the anti-doping officer should have knocked on the door of her hotel room. He did not and she was let off.
It is the thinnest technicality on which to rely and a few days before her race, Matthew Syed, sports columnist at the Times called out Armtistead and the less than outraged reaction around her indiscretions.
“Now, I have no reason to dispute the decision of CAS [Court of Arbitrater Sports],” Syed wrote, “and have always rather admired Armitstead, but I can’t help wondering if the reaction would have been quite the same if she had been Russian, or Eastern European – or black.
“After all, when Christine Ohuruogu (the British 400m runner, who won gold at the 2008 Olympics) missed three tests (in 2006, in the days when the forms were more opaque and updating one’s whereabouts more onerous) she was vilified.”
The reaction almost certainly would not have been. There would not have been demonstrated the kind of willingness to understand any nuances in the case, or to accept the excuses.
She would not have had the same chances to give interviews or, as the PRers like to say, grab the narrative.
It is a quandary and what kind of a quandary is not as important as the fact that it reinforces ultimately the mess and duplicity that is the IOC’s fight against doping in sport.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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