RIO DE JANEIRO — Officially,
these are the Rio Games, and for all of the polluted water and political
unrest and disease-carrying mosquitoes, the games themselves – the
Olympic events that start Saturday morning – were supposed to play
savior for the surrounding squalor. Now, thanks to the International
Olympic Committee’s special brand of relationship building that tied it
to Vladimir Putin, not even the sports themselves can serve as a
panacea. Sorry, Brazil. These are Russia’s Olympics.
Already, before the first medal has been awarded, the
specter of Russia’s state-run doping program, and the IOC’s decision to
allow at least 271 of the country’s athletes into competition, has
caused consternation throughout the Olympic movement. And it’s bound to
get worse as Russians find their way toward the medal stand and those
who don’t speak out.
Sports Illustrated predicted 59 medals for the
Russians, including 14 golds. And when an athlete who has spent four
years building for this moment, for the glory of being an Olympic
champion, loses to someone from a country whose spy agency spearheaded a
systematic, country-wide program to hide positive drug tests, will he
or she stay silent? How about the one who finishes in fourth place and
loses a chance to medal?
Of course not. By allowing individual sport
federations to rule on the status of Russian athletes, the IOC made the
worldwide games about a single country, which takes a special sort of
idiocy, corruption or, likelier in this case, a delightful marriage of
both.
Vladimir Putin has dismissed the doping allegations against RUSSIA’s athletes. (Getty)
British long jumper Greg Rutherford told The Guardian
that skipping a blanket ban on Russians was “a spineless attempt to
appear as the nice guy to both sides.” Sarah Konrad, who chairs the
athletes’ advisory council for the United States, was just as blunt to
the Associated Press: “I think the IOC made the wrong decision.”
And to this, and the sentiment echoed by so
many others, Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, offered a response
so full of hubris and arrogance that of course it came from the
president of the IOC: “I can look into the eyes of these athletes
because I have a very clean conscience.”
A clean conscience. Thomas Bach, whose first call to congratulate him as IOC president came from Putin,
has a clean conscience. Thomas Bach, whose first Olympics as president
were the rotten-to-the-core $51 billion Sochi Games, has a clean
conscience. Thomas Bach, a former Olympian himself, an advocate of
drug-free sport who with one power move has neutered the very idea of it
in the Olympics, has a clean conscience. Got it.
As if on cue, a reporter who identified
herself as from Russian state TV stood up at Bach’s clean-conscience
news conference and asked: “Is it true you were helping us as we think?”
It was glorious. A Russian mouthpiece was asking for on-the-record
confirmation from the IOC president that, yes, he was an empty,
tarnished suit.
“This is not the decision of helping somebody
here or helping somebody there,” Bach said. “This is a decision of
justice, which we could take only on the facts which are available now,
and this we have done. In justice, there is a saying. Justice has to be
blind.”
IOC president Thomas Bach looks from his balcony after moving into the Olympic village. (Reuters)
Justice, it turned out, was served in only a
way that a bureaucrat would consider proper: No official from Russian
Ministry of Sport will receive accreditation to the Rio Games. The
horror. In the insular world of Olympic sports, where aristocrats reap
billions of dollars, live the high life and run an athletic scheme that
makes the NCAA look like Mickey Mouse, taking away accreditation from a
fellow administrator is positively nuclear.
What it didn’t do was eliminate the
superiority with which the Russian delegation operates. If anything, it
emboldened them. Russia doped, got caught and escaped. And with a
straight face this week, Russia Olympic Committee president Alexander
Zhukov told reporters that it will be “the cleanest team” in Rio.
He talked about the testing Russian athletes
had endured – the same kind of testing they beat without fail at the
Sochi Games. And this is what gives so many in the Olympic Village
pause: How can anyone possibly believe Russia suddenly went clean?
“We have the support of many, many athletes,” Bach said.
More than 10,000 athletes will compete in
these Olympics. Is many 50? One hundred? A thousand? More? If that’s
true, Bach has an even bigger problem on his hands than Russia. Because
the likeliest athlete to support a cheater is a cheater, and with the
Olympic movement already in peril because of its many issues, the
prospect of an athlete base polluted with doping is an even worse
nightmare than the Russian scandal that bubbled to the surface.
Maybe the good to come out of
this is how it exposes the IOC, though the IOC has spent decades as the
unclothed emperor, and here it is, still standing, still, in its
backward way, thriving. And still conducting business as it ever did.
If there was one athlete who belonged in Rio,
it was the one who started this all. Before Pro Publica ran its damning
report on the World Anti-Doping Association sitting on vital
information about Russia’s program … and before the McLaren Report laid
out the details of how Russia did what it did … and before The New York
Times spoke with the man who ran the lab and blew it wide open … there
was Yuliya Stepanova, an 800-meter runner and whistleblower.
In 2014, Stepanova, who had been banned two
years for doping, told German television station ARD about the Russian
system. Without her, this may still remain a secret. She risked her
livelihood, maybe her life, to tell a story that needed to be told. And
when she asked the IOC for the chance to run unaffiliated, it rejected
her.
The story of Stepanova will be told over the
next
two weeks, as will those of all the athletes who wonder why Russia
is here. While they may not drown out the great accomplishments to come,
they’ll be loud, get louder and drown out so much of what’s happening.
And as the last fleck of its credibility crumbles, the IOC will have
nobody to blame but itself.
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