Russia will do what it wants in Rio

By  PETER BERLIN 

If Moscow can invade Crimea and get away with it, then it can cheat to win Olympic medals.

The Olympic jamboree starts Friday in Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the Games, as the organizers scrambled to iron out all the traditional last-minute snags, they faced a thorny social problem: Should we invite the druggies to our party?

Less than three weeks before the start of the Olympics, the World Anti-Doping Agency urged a total ban on Russian participation. WADA released a report that it claimed corroborated “state-sponsored subversion of anti-doping processes.” The highlight was a scheme to cheat drug testers at the Sochi Winter Olympics — an example, it said, of Russia’s breathtaking contempt for international rules.

Vladimir Putin sincerely believes the rest of the world is just as cynical and corrupt as he is but that it simply doesn’t have the guts to acknowledge it. The Olympic authorities’ confused and timid reaction to WADA’s report suggests that the Russians can hope to act badly and bluster their way out of paying a heavy price — as they have so many times before.

In January 2014, the Brookings Institution addressed a memo to U.S. President Barack Obama warning that Russia, freed from the threat of a potential boycott, would start misbehaving after the Sochi Games wrapped up. True to form, Russia annexed Crimea in March, less than a month after the Games ended. Shortly afterward, they moved into eastern Ukraine.

In the end, few Russians who were not already banned will miss the Games. Just as Russian-backed militias are still in Donetsk, so Russian athletes will be in Rio.

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Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin sees sport as a propaganda tool. He wants to make Russia great again. And big wins in the international sporting arena would give off the impression that he is succeeding.

Centrally organized Russian doping goes back to 1952 when the old Soviet Union first deigned to compete in the Olympics. Under Putin, Russia has built a state-sponsored doping system on steroids.

The problem for the Russians is that anti-doping tests had been vastly improved. By the start of the decade, Russian athletes were testing positive at an eye-catching rate. Russia responded by trying to beat the system and to cow, subvert or buy officials.

So complex was the Russian doping conspiracy that it became difficult to keep everyone in line. Former officials of RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency, began squealing to the Western media. In 2014, Vitaly Stepanov appeared in a German documentary describing state-sponsored doping. WADA investigated. Its report, in November 2015, focused on Russian doping in track and field — not a Winter Olympic sport. It found that the Russians had destroyed some 1,400 positive samples and bribed officials of track and field’s governing body, the IAAF, to ignore positive tests. It also detected the hand of the FSB, the successor to the KGB.

In May, Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the drug testing lab in Sochi who fled Russia, told his tale to the New York Times. At the 2014 Winter Games, testing was conducted in Russian labs, in Sochi and Moscow, but the hosts had to find a way to deceive the latest WADA weapon: neutral observers.

The FSB came up with a scheme that suggests its agents may have watched too many “Mission Impossible” movies. It drilled holes in the wall of the room where samples were stored and devised a system for replacing the seals on the bottles. Agents dressed as plumbers switched bottles at night. Senior figures in Moscow would decide whether to replace the dirty samples with clean ones or to hang the athlete out to dry. They communicated their choice with code words.

WADA again launched an inquiry, this time under a Canadian law professor, Richard McLaren, who reported that “the forensic evidence corroborates what Rodchenkov was saying.” WADA was unequivocal. Russia should be banned from Rio.

But the International Olympic Committee equivocated. In the face of overwhelming evidence that Russia had deliberately and systematically broken the rules, the IOC could not bring itself to pull the trigger.

The committee and its member federations include senior Russian officials who face political pressure from Russia. It is likely that not all of the IOC’s paymasters were united behind a Russian ban. The sponsors have business in Russia. And for national broadcasters, a Russian baddie in lane 6 makes for better TV.

The IOC also had legal and ethical concerns about banning athletes who had never tested positive. They would be punishing the innocent. The IOC also feared a challenge in the courts. They took legal advice and then ran for the hills.

Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, had previously talked of removing sports federations’ control of drug-testing because they could not be trusted to take tough decisions.

Now, Bach refused to make a tough decision. After WADA called for a ban, Bach passed the buck to individual sports federations. Several began rubber-stamping Russian athletes at once.

After Bach backed down he was razzed by German tabloid Bild. It ran a picture of Bach under the headline: “Putin’s Poodle.”

The Russian government reiterated its opposition to doping and promised to root out the guilty while insisting others cheat as much, or more, than they do. The Kremlin argued that the accusations were politically motivated.

Rodchenkov, the Russians say, was a doping profiteer who bought drugs in the U.S. and sold them to athletes. He switched samples in Sochi to cover his tracks, they claim.

It hardly matters. Rodchenkov was telling the truth, but even though Russia was caught breaking the international rules in a systematic and premeditated fashion, the IOC could not find the unity to push back.

It’s become a familiar story. Just as Russia can bomb Syria or occupy Crimea, it can corrupt the Olympics. And it can count on a response that is long on words and short on action.

Peter Berlin covered global soccer for 20 years for the Financial Times and then theInternational Herald Tribune. He is now a freelance journalist covering soccer for, among others, Sports Illustrated.

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