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Column: Blame Russia for doping, but blame the IOC too

Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics, after the International Olympic Committee found evidence of an “unprecedented systematic manipulation” of the anti-doping system.

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So, the International Olympic Committee has banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea – kind of, sort of, almost, since “clean” Russian athletes will be allowed to compete in Pyeongchang wearing uniforms that identify them as OAR (Olympic Athletes from Russia) – while huffing and puffing how this time it means business about doping. Really, it does.

Speaking in English, IOC president Thomas Bach outlined the draconian sanctions and new measures to expand drug-testing programs “so that something like this can hopefully not happen again.” He called Russia’s intricate system of mouse holes in the Sochi doping lab and swapped urine canisters “an unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games,” a phrase he has used before and repeated several times during an hour-long press conference Tuesday at the IOC’s august headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Then a reporter asked if he could repeat his remarks in his native tongue.

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Bach looked to his aides for help. “What is ‘unprecedented’ in German?” he asked.

Beispiellos, someone suggested.

Bach: “Isn’t there another term?”

How about just BS?

The IOC sanctioned Russia because, well, it couldn’t exactly sanction itself, could it? And Russia was an easy target, given that the man who masterminded the scheme defected and told all to Western media, even releasing detailed diaries that fingered several high-ranking government officials.

Russia figured that instead of going through the hassle of scientifically engineering undetectable performance-enhancing substances, it was easier to feed its biathletes and speedskaters whatever steroids it wanted – no matter how long their chemical fingerprints hung around – and simply swap out the dirty for clean urine. This supposedly was impossible because the urine is kept in “tamper-proof” canisters meticulously developed from the anti-doping community’s annual budget of roughly $276.94 (give or take a few cents).

Since the IOC allowed the Olympic organizers to build the anti-doping lab during the Games, they drilled a small hole in the wall and, in the dead of night, passed the canisters with roided-up urine to secret police agents on the other side. They opened them, poured out the incriminating evidence and replaced it with untainted urine that was innocently analyzed by the lab’s state-of-the-art mass spectrometry techniques.

Widespread, systematic, state-sponsored doping at its finest.

Sound familiar?

In German, you’d say: Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

DDR. East Germany.

Beispiellos, really?

Bach and the IOC spent Tuesday chastising Russia, banning its flag and its Olympic officials from the 2018 Winter Games, when really what they were doing was incriminating themselves.

Blame Russia for Sochi. But blame the IOC and the international sports community for everything that came before it, for blithely ignoring the scourge of doping until it was too late, for creating a culture where athletes and sometimes entire nations feel compelled to cheat, for awarding the 2014 Winter Olympics to a country that spent $51 billion building ski jumps and that uses sport to promote political agendas and that didn’t want a repeat on home soil of its embarrassing medal haul (three golds) at the previous Games.

Russia created the mouse hole. The IOC created the loopholes.

The East Germans were never banned from an Olympics because they never got caught. It wasn’t until after the wall came down, in the 1990s, that Stasi files were unsealed and the true extent of their transgressions – 10,000 athletes over three decades – were revealed.

But it wasn’t like the Olympic movement had no idea something was amiss. If the hulking female swimmers with mustaches and deep voices didn’t give it away, the medals table did. The DDR, competing as its own nation for the first time at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, won 25 medals – beyond impressive with a population of just 17 million.

Then 66 medals in 1972.

Then 90 in 1976.

Then 126 in 1980.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, who honed his leadership skills as part of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, became IOC president the following year and is credited with rescuing a teetering movement plagued by boycotts and red ink. He commercialized and professionalized the Games, and also realized along the way that drug positives were bad for business.

In 1984 and two other Games during his 21-year tenure, there were allegations of positive tests being, cough-cough, disregarded. After the Festina cycling scandal in 1998, when border officers found hundreds of drugs and doping paraphernalia in a car belonging to a Tour de France team, Samaranch told Spanish media that the solution was not to increase the list of banned substances but “drastically” reduce it.

He also said this: “Doping is everything that, firstly, is harmful to an athlete’s health and, secondly, artificially augments his performance. If it’s just the second case, for me that’s not doping.” (Gulp.)

He even bestowed the Olympic Order, the IOC’s highest honor, on Manfred Ewald – a key architect of East Germany’s doping machine.

Dick Pound, a longtime IOC member from Canada and former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told Reuters in 2007: “Samaranch wasn’t interested in (doping). There was no money available for research and Samaranch wasn’t interested in using the Olympic leverage against the international federations to make them do their job. He was never willing to do that.”

WADA was finally established in 2000, but its model was flawed. It served as an umbrella organization for a network of allegedly independent national anti-doping agencies, which many countries simply never created or some, like Russia and Kenya, simply corrupted.

It smacked of the anti-doping programs in U.S. professional sports leagues: There to assuage sponsor and fan concerns, but just there. Bust a couple sprinters, make a big show, feign indignation, get back to business.

WADA didn’t produce a universal banned substance list until 2004. It didn’t propose adding investigative powers to its oversight duties until 2013, and those bylaws weren’t enacted until 2015 – five years after a whistleblower from the Russian lab first provided WADA with detailed accounts of what sounded an awful lot like widespread, systemic, state-sponsored doping. It wasn’t until media reports, first from German TV station ARD and then newspapers, that WADA or the IOC finally launched a formal probe.

And it wasn’t until last March that WADA approved the formation of the Swiss-based Independent Testing Authority so an uncompromised agency can, you know, actually test athletes for international sports federations and at major competitions like the Olympics.

The ITA’s first event will be the 2018 Winter Games – a half-century after Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the East German national anthem, began echoing through Olympic arenas with astonishing and frightening frequency.

With East Germany no longer having any use for it, maybe the IOC could adopt it.

Risen from ruins

And facing the future,

Let us serve you for the good.

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mark.zeigler@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutzeigler

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