On Sunday the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally took a decision on Russia. It chose not to impose a blanket ban on the Russian contingent, instead leaving it to each of the 28 sports federations that constitute the Summer Games to decide, on an individual basis, which Russian athlete does or does not get to compete.
That decision has hardly brought the closure many felt was needed – the decision of each federation, to allow and bar Russian athletes, will garner precisely the kind of headlines the IOC does not want in the build-up to Rio.
But it is one in a series of decisive moments in what has been a long-running saga that has carried unmistakable and uncomfortable echoes of the infamous East German doping regime that so tainted the Games between 1968 and 1988.
It began with the airing of a documentary on the German TV network MDR in December 2014. Two whistle-blowers from Russian sports – the 800-metre runner Yuliya Stepanova and her husband Vitaliy Stepanov (who worked with Russia’s anti-doping agency Rusada) – alleged that what amounted to a state-sanctioned doping system was in place for Russia’s Olympic athletes.
A year later, acting on those allegations, the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) produced a scathing 325-page report, written by its former chairman Dick Pound, which found “a deeply rooted culture of cheating” and recommended banning Russia from international competition, including the Rio Olympics.
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Pointedly, the report said that the findings were reminiscent of “an inherited attitude from the old Cold War days”.
In May this year, the head of Russia's anti-doping lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, revealed startling details to The New York Times of how he helped Russian athletes beat doping tests at the Sochi Winter Olympics. In his estimation, he helped replace nearly 100 positively tested urine samples with clean ones taken months before the doping began.
Those revelations prompted a second Wada investigation, led by a Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, and he published his findings earlier this month, and they were no less damning. McLaren called Russia’s policy the “disappearing positive methodology” and said, with assistance from the country’s secret service, lasted from 2011 until at least last year.
The report found that out of 577 positive samples, 312 were effectively swapped with older, clean samples. Though track and field and wrestling were the sports most affected, in all, the positive samples came from 30 different sports, including beach volleyball and table tennis.
In this light it is easy to see why the IOC has been so widely criticised for taking the decision that it has, which is to say that it has actually not made a decision and left it, instead, to other individual federations to resolve.
Pound, the former Wada chief who carried out the first investigation that has led to a ban on all Russian track and field athletes at Rio, said the decision revealed that there was “zero tolerance for doping, unless it’s Russia”.
Logistically too, the decision does not have much going for it: how can federations complete time-consuming and complex procedures of testing of, potentially, so many athletes with such little time left?
But Thomas Bach, the IOC head, is a lawyer by profession and it is impossible not to see lawyerly imprints all over the decision. Even before the decision was made, the IOC was exploring “its legal options with regard to a collective ban of all Russian athletes – versus the right to individual justice”.
Once the decision was taken, Bach expanded on this thinking: “An athlete should not suffer and be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated and where he can show that he was not implicated. I am really convinced of this decision and fine with it.”
Could a blanket ban have opened up the IOC to legal action by individual Russian athletes who were clean and not part of that state-sanctioned regime? The possibility cannot be ruled out.
But an earlier decision by the Court of Arbitration Sports (CAS) to reject an appeal by Russia’s track athletes against a collective IAAF ban suggests any blanket decision could have held firm legally.
And others may point to history and the ban on South Africa and any of its athletes from competing in the Olympics because of the apartheid regime of its government.
In any case, one of the IOC’s decisions – to bar any Russian athlete from competing who has previously tested positive – can be said to be legally flimsy. It has affected, most notably, the whistle-blower Stepanova, and it will no doubt hurt the event’s credibility that she is not able to participate but, as one example, Justin Gatlin, who has been found guilty of doping previously – twice – is.
There also remains the sense, as Pound pointed out and was articulated by one Olympic legend, that Russia is the only country that has been found out. “It’s good what the IOC and IAAF are doing,” Said Aouita said in Dubai this week.
Aouita won the Olympic gold in the 5,000 metres at the Los Angeles Games and is regarded as one of the middle-distance running greats. He is currently working as a technical adviser to the UAE track and field athletes on the way to Rio.
“I am against cheating; we know Russia is cheating,” Aouita said, but adding that it’s “there in the USA, in Europe, in England. There is everywhere. And if they want to check, check not just from 2008 but from before.
“They must check all athletes – now there is DNA testing, we can find out who has [cheated]. If you want to be really logical about this, then that is what you have to do.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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