THEY'RE BAAAACK!

                You might have missed it because the sports pages these days don’t give much space to such things, but something big happened a couple of weeks ago in the realm of international sports. WADA, which stands for the World Anti-Doping Agency, reinstated Russia’s drug-testing programs, lifting a three-year ban that made it difficult for athletes from that country to compete in Olympic sports. The move came as a surprise because Russia hadn’t met the requirements that had been set before reinstatement could occur.

OK, the agency said in effect, we’ve upset things long enough. It’s time to return to business as usual. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you don’t follow such things you might ask what inconvenience Russia suffered in the wake of well-founded revelations that it engineered a widespread, state-sponsored  doping assault on the 2014 Winter Games, which it hosted in the Black Sea city of Sochi. Although the allegations surfaced well before the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, the International Olympic Committee punted any penalties for that fest to its individual sports federations, most of which allowed Russians to compete. Before the 2016 Winter Games in South Korea the IOC puffed itself up enough to outlaw Russia flags and anthems, but allowed any qualified Russian athlete who could pass a drug test to compete under the banner of “Olympic Athletes From Russia.” Almost 170 did, making up the third largest national contingent there.

Some penalties had to be imposed because the offenses that led to them were so blatant and crudely executed they couldn’t be ignored. They involved cutting a hole through a wall of the drug-testing lab at Sochi and passing through it “clean” urine samples to be substituted for athletes’ real, dirty ones while Russia’s equivalent of the FBI stood guard.  We had that from various sources, including Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of the lab in question, who fled to the U.S. in fear of his life after other accounts of the scheme began to surface. Subsequent investigations revealed that as many as 100 Russian samples had been tampered with, and 17 of that country’s 33 Sochi medals were taken away.   

In 2015 WADA stripped its certification of Russia’s testing labs and set down two conditions for reinstatement; namely, that Russia admit to the offenses and give it access to the many urine samples and records that weren’t available to initial investigators. Reinstatement came despite neither of those conditions being met, although anyone who thought the country would allow incriminating evidence in its possession to be turned over untouched to other authorities must be daft.

 From the outset Russia followed its usual course when accused of international wrongdoing, which is to deny, deny, deny, and for good measure it cried about “Western” conspiracies to defame it. It even thumbed its nose at accusers by promoting to deputy prime minister Vitali Mutko, who as the nation’s sports minister oversaw the doping operation. That made him the nation’s No. 3 politician, behind only Boss Putin and Putin’s hand-picked prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev. Great job, Vitali.

                The WADA decision to let Russia back in the game was consistent with just about all previous rulings by the IOC, its parent organization. Contrary to public view, WADA is not an independent agency but an arm of the IOC, which started it in 1999 to try to bring order to a drug-enforcement regime that differed widely from country to country and sport to sport, and caused widespread derision. That the IOC pulls the strings at WADA is seen in the facts that it directly supplies half the agency’s operating budget and, through its ties to member-nation governments, also supplies the other half. WADA’s founder and first president (1999-2007) was Dick Pound, long a prominent IOC official. Its current president is the Scotsman Craig Reedie, an IOC vice president. 

WADA promulgated a uniform anti-doping code for Olympic sports and oversees its application, but has no research or drug-testing facilities of its own. It leaves that to some 30 national and regional labs which, no doubt, vary in honesty and competence. Further, its political will is no stronger than that of its IOC parent. Time and again, through war, scandal, geopolitical upheaval and even murder (at the 1972 Munich Games), the IOC’s motto has been the show-biz one: “the show must go on.” With it, of course, comes the Olympics’ immense revenues and graft, the latter of which flows easiest in authoritarian regimes like Russian and China. Indeed, the day after the ban was lifted Russia was added to the short list of countries seeking to hold the 2023 European Games.

In creating WADA, the IOC showed it had no intention of surrendering any important function to an outside group that could turn troublesome. In that, by the way, it’s much the same as such American sports organizations as the NCAA, the NFL and Major League Baseball, which also keep a tight grip on drug testing and anything else that might affect their fortunes. The resulting governance in all cases has shown that when the policeman also is the promoter the promoter side rules.

WADA’s Russia call has spurred criticism, mostly from athletes who say they want their playing fields to be level. The most effective protest of it would come in the form of an athlete boycott of any event that includes Russians, but athletes have small windows in which to perform at world-class levels and, in the past, have been loath to narrow it by taking such measures.  So the show will go on and all we can do is hold our noses.