Now that there is zero doubt the Russian government sent spies to infiltrate Olympic doping laboratories and cover up positive drug tests, the International Olympic Committee is considering a ban on all Russian athletes at next month’s Rio Games.
It would be a huge mistake.
Banning a whole nation from the Games would set a dangerous precedent, excluding athletes without due process and thereby feeding a narrative of “anti-Russia persecution” that Vladimir Putin has found useful in the past.
Already Putin has responded to Monday’s World Anti-Doping Agency report, which accused the Russian government of backing a sophisticated doping program that covered up 580 positive tests from 30 different sports, in part by sending agents of the state security service to “disappear” positive drug tests from laboratories in Moscow and Sochi.
“Today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports,” Putin said, calling for a “fuller, more objective information that is based on facts.” A statement like that signals to Russian propagandists Putin’s encouragement to portray the WADA report as yet another tool of a western conspiracy to limit Russia’s power around the globe.
Meanwhile the IOC promised “the toughest possible sanctions available against any individual or organization implicated.” The loudest call for suspending the Russian Olympic team outright came on Monday from WADA.
But history suggests that within a state-sponsored doping system, athletes are merely pawns of powerful political forces who will use all means necessary to enforce secrecy and demand results. When the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany was revealed to have sponsored doping, it quickly became apparent that the athletes were victims, some of them permanently disfigured by drugs they were powerless to refuse.
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The main difference is that by the time East Germany’s deceptions were laid bare, the nation had collapsed and had no post-scandal Olympic team to serve as a yardstick for comparison. Today, Russia has been exposed, and its Olympic athletes are weeks away from competing without the protection of its state-sponsored doping program.
There is a chance for the innocent athletes to have their moment on the world stage, and for the rest of the team to show the world just how weak Russian sports is without the backing of government subterfuge.
At any rate, one group that should certainly refrain from finger-pointing on the doping front is America, home of Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, and Marion Jones. Perhaps their cheating wasn’t backed by the government — in fact, each of them was called to the carpet by the U.S. Justice Department — but the rest of the world sees clearly that Russia isn’t the only country with a win-at-all-costs sports culture.
Doping is not merely a problem at the level of the state. Multi-national corporations have also been shown to create conditions that hardly seem to discourage doping. Last year, an investigation from the BBC and ProPublica alleged that athletes affiliated with Nike’s “Oregon Project,” a training program run by Alberto Salazar, were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs for which they had no legitimate medical need. And in 2013, the Daily News revealed that Dietrich Mateschitz, founder of Red Bull energy drinks, had personally recruited convicted East German doping doctor Bernd Pansold to oversee conditioning programs of various Red Bull athletes at a secretive facility in Thalgau, Austria.