Shi Davidi will be covering the Canadian men’s hockey team at the upcoming Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games for sportsnet.ca.
TORONTO – Long at the forefront of the fight against doping in sport, Richard Pound is on edge awaiting the International Olympic Committee’s decision Tuesday on whether to ban Russia from the 2018 Winter Games.
“I would say apprehensive that they don’t do the right thing,” is how the founding president World Anti-Doping Agency summed up his feelings during an interview Monday.
The right thing is painfully obvious to the former Canadian Olympic swimmer, influential IOC member and the first person to lead an investigation into the staggering conspiratorial system of state-sponsored doping run by the Russians ahead of and during the 2014 Sochi Games.
A subsequent and damning probe by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren in December 2016 that detailed how more than 1,000 athletes had cheated in a program supported by the FSB – the intelligence agency that succeeded the Cold-War-era KGB – left little room for doubt, making it imperative for IOC president Thomas Bach to act decisively.
“In all of the circumstances of the breadth of the doping program, the frontal attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games – it ranks up there with the South African government on apartheid – I think they have to pay the price by being excluded,” said Pound. “To be still saying there was no such system going on in Russia and that there’s been zero contrition, instead everyone else on the face of the planet has been blamed for it except for Russia, is simply not acceptable.
“That message has to be transmitted without fear or favour.”
Bach whiffed at the previous opportunity to deliver just such a message when he declined to follow WADA’s recommendation of a blanket ban on Russia for the 2016 Summer Olympics and instead allowed athletes that proved themselves clean to compete. Of the 389 competitors Russia planned to send, 291 ended up taking part.
Though the evidence against Russia has only built since then, some still question whether Bach will have the courage to take the next step this time.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Pound said. “My view is the IOC should be the principal actor in this. It should make the decision that is right, take it and be done with it. Not to say, ‘Well, we’ll let the Russians who can prove that they’re clean, assuming they can, in, but they can’t come with the Russian flag, just an Olympic flag.’ That gives the Russians another chance to throw a hissy fit and withdraw, rather than be excluded. I think it’s important to get that right.”
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Any credibility that may remain in the Olympic ideals may very well hinge on the IOC’s call, given the level of audacious treachery at play here.
The current scandal began coming to light in December 2014, when an ARD documentary on German TV alleged that Russian officials systemically accepted payments from athletes to supply banned substances and cover up positive tests and featured former discus thrower Yevgeniya Pecherina claiming that “most, the majority, 99 per cent” of top international level Russian athletes cheated.
That prompted both the International Association of Athletics Federations and WADA to begin investigations, with Pound leading an independent commission that confirmed the ARD report in December 2015.
“It’s worse than we thought,” he said at the time.
McLaren, part of Pound’s team on the initial probe, was tasked the following May with leading an independent investigation into Russia’s actions after whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of Moscow’s anti-doping lab who defected to the U.S. in 2015, detailed how the Sochi Games had been fixed to the New York Times.
An interim report was released in mid-July before the Rio Olympics corroborating Rodchenkov’s claims, and while the IAAF decided to ban Russian track and field athletes from those Games, the IOC did not.
“Justice has to be independent of politics,” Bach said then.
The full report in December included data from computer hard drives, databases and emails that supported witness testimony on how post-competition urine samples of Russian athletes were systemically swapped out of the Sochi lab through a hole in the wall, and replaced with clean samples stored in a nearby building occupied by the FSB.
“It is impossible to know how deep and how far back this conspiracy goes,” McLaren said during the announcement.
Rodchenkov’s remarkable story is captured brilliantly by the Netflix documentary “Icarus” released this past summer and it plays like an impossible spy thriller. While the scope of the scandal can seem almost unfathomable, Pound said, “For folks of my generation, who’ve been around since the days of the Soviet Union and East Germany, it wasn’t surprising that there was a state-imposed system still going on as there had been back in those days.”
“We were lucky in my commission, we had a couple of very good whistleblowers who were very well informed but lower down in the food chain,” continued Pound. “When McLaren got the second one with Rodchenkov, he was at the top of the food chain and he knew exactly how all this was being done and being organized. He himself played a significant role in it. He knew how the samples were being swapped and cleaned up, containers opened, all that sort of stuff, and was able to point McLaren in the right direction.”
Russian government and sports officials have consistently denied the claims but 25 Russians that competed in Sochi have since been punished retroactively for doping, costing the country 11 medals.
There may very well be more to come, too.
Now, with the Pyeongchang Games looming, the IOC faces another moment of reckoning, one that might help restore some faith in the idea of clean competition at the Olympics, or destroy any that still remains.
“There are lots of folks talking the talk, but at least in the Olympics, we’re trying – not wholly successfully – but we’re trying to make sure that clean athletes are protected,” said Pound. “Every bad guy we catch and exclude is a minor victory, and sooner or later your minor victories add up and you may bring about a wholesale conduct change.
“It’s not unlike the second-hand smoke thing. If I had said to you 40 years ago that on Dec. 4, 2017, it would be illegal to smoke a cigarette in a restaurant in Paris, you’d have laughed me out of the room. But bit by bit, people figured it out and ended up doing the right thing. Now, it would be really offensive if you went to a restaurant and found people smoking.”
The IOC keeps saying it finds doping athletes and those that support them offensive. The time has come for Bach and company to prove it.
