It would be something of an understatement to say that the effect of the current doping scandal on the Rio Olympics, which begin a week today, has dominated the headlines.
The consequences of banning Russia’s track and field team in its entirety have been poured over, as has the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to not impose a blanket ban on the whole Russian team. The big question around the IOC’s decision has been what will it do to public trust when spectators are watching athletes wearing Russian vests competing for Olympic medals?
Recent investigations have revealed that doping within Russia was wide-spread - 30 sports were involved and many thousand doping samples were destroyed - leaving it impossible to know if the full truth will ever be outed.
But what has not been discussed is what will happen after Rio. In just over three weeks' time, the 2016 Olympic Games will be over and this current mess will most certainly not have been cleared up.
The ban by athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, will still be in place when the curtain comes down on the Rio Games but it is unclear where sport as a whole will go in the coming months and years. With the IOC leaving the decision up to the individual sports’ governing bodies as to who to ban from Rio, it appears that only a few dozen Russians outwith track and field will be excluded.
But even those who are banned from competing in the Olympics will be able to compete again immediately as it is only an Olympic ban, not a ban from all competition that has been set.
It is impossible to predict what the reaction will be from the public when they watch Russian athletes compete in Rio and, most pertinently, when they win medals in Rio. It seems unlikely that a Russian athlete on the podium will be met with a favourable reception despite the fact that there will be no concrete evidence of them having doped. So the trust around sport could, in fact, be even worse post-Rio than it is now.
What is perhaps most concerning about this doping scandal is that the spotlight on track and field has allowed other sports, which also have significant and irrefutable doping issues, to escape with far less damage than should be the case. That is partially because track and field’s problem is so severe and there is a bank of evidence to back it up and partially because athletics is the Olympics crown jewels. Without track and field, the attraction of the Olympics would drop significantly.
But these two facts have been used by other sports to slip under the radar somewhat. Swimming, in particular, has a doping problem which is universally acknowledged as extremely serious. And the sport’s governing body, FINA, has shown itself to be worryingly poor at dealing with it. Only seven Russian swimmers have been banned from competing at Rio even though there has been strong suggestions that Russian swimmers have been the subjects of a state-sponsored doping programme in the same way that track and field athletes were.
Earlier this month, Olympic silver medallist, Michael Jamieson, tweeted to FINA: “You are disgracing our sport and destroying the career of honest athletes- shame on you all,” in response to FINA’s leniency towards, Yulia Efimova, a Russian world champion who was suspected of taking meldonium. Furthermore, the President of FINA, Julio Maglione, claimed earlier this week that the McLaren commission, which released its report almost a fortnight ago, had exceeded its powers. It’s hardly the comment of someone who you would trust with cleaning up their sport, is it?
The most pressing issue that will arise after Rio is how to rid sport of the drugs cheats who currently seem to pervade it, or at least reduce the number of them. WADA has said that if doping is carried out at a very sophisticated level, they probably can’t stop it. The IOC, by refusing to put a blanket Olympic ban on Russia, has effectively said that it doesn’t care about clean sport. And nobody has offered any ground-breaking suggestions as to how to fix this doping problem that is slowly but surely killing sport.
Sporting bodies have long been reluctant to accept help from those who facilitated cheating. Notably, Victor Conte, who was behind the BALCO drugs scandal, has made some pertinent points about where the problem lies and what can be done to catch the cheats, or at least make the system harder to manipulate than it currently is.
However, those at the top remain too pig-headed to accept advice from individuals who they consider to be on the other side. In a perfect world, people like Conte would be ostracised, never to be heard of again. But with so few ideas coming from WADA and the IOC about how to fix this problem, isn’t it time to become a bit more open-minded and take suggestions from all angles?
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