Will the Russian Doping Scandal Destroy Competitive Athletics?
The doping scandal in Russia demonstrates that competitive athletics might be damaged beyond repair. It's an opinion that even some athletes are echoing.
Just how big is the Russian doping scandal? Well, thanks to a December documentary that aired on German TV, we already know the scandal's scope in terms of total athletes: damn near every one. The documentary suggested 99 percent of Russian athletes used performance enhancing drugs. Drugs that were provided by—and covered up by—the Russian Athletics Federation. (You can check out an English translation of the documentary's transcript here.) But how big is the scandal in terms of its impact on the sports world?
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It depends on whom you ask. Answers range from actually laughing and calling it "a joke" to discussing it as an existential threat to track and field as we know it. What's funny is how predictable the answers are when you consider their sources.
If you look at how the Russian Athletics Federation has treated the scandal so far, you might think it boils down to just the race walk team and a couple bad apples sprinkled throughout the rest of Russian athletics. In January, three members of the race walk team were banned. Valentin Maslakov, the head coach of Russian athletics, subsequently resigned.Here's how Valentin Balakhnichev, the president of Russian athletics, announced Maslakov's resignation, as quoted by the BBC:"Even though Maslakov has nothing to do with anti-doping policies of the athletics team, he could not stand by idly and decided to take responsibility for those who he was in charge of."That was big of him. Maslakov has since taken a job as a Federation sprinting coach.
Image via WikiMedia Commons user Roberta F.
This past week, Balakhnichev himself resigned. (Balakhnichev had resigned as the treasurer for the International Association of Athletics Federation after the scandal broke in December.) In announcing his resignation, he echoed the tone of his Maslakov non-apology apology: "The president takes responsibility, so I decided to resign."Time will tell if the scandal takes down officials across the breadth of Russian track and field. Viktor Chegin, the race walking coach, is expected to resign at any moment. And the Russian Federation is suing ARD, the German TV station that made the documentary.
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Limiting it to the race walking squad would be a win for the Russian Federation. Obviously, there's reason to be skeptical of any attempt to make an example out of the race walkers—not least because an investigation into doping in the race walking team started six months before the documentary even aired. But the first rule of damage control is to find a good scapegoat.IAAF president Lamine Diack is also focused on damage control. Earlier this week, he appeared in a BBC television interview and made a series of statements that went from damage control to outright denial.The interview started off about as expected. When asked about the scandal, Diack said, "It's a difficult crisis, but we will put it behind us."Later, he said it was "a joke. For me, it's ridiculous. To say that athletes, that sport in Russia, 99 percent are cheating? It's a ridiculous assertion."Diack went on to suggest the number of athletes involved in Russian doping was much lower and said he is "sure" there was no IAAF coverup. This despite Diack's own son having resigned from his IAAF position in December pending an investigation into his involvement in an IAAF coverup.For the athletes, the IAAF's failure to properly address doping prior to the Russian scandal is a major source of anger. Christine Ohuruogu, the 400 meter world champion, responded to Diack's comments, as quoted in the Guardian, thusly:"It's really annoying when he says things like that because we're on the floor doing the hard work so you wonder what the people at the top are doing. We are all working really hard to put our sport in a positive light and then you have these guys at the top who are basically telling us they don't know what's happening."
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Perhaps it's no surprise that athletes themselves appear to be the most concerned about how the scandal will affect their sport in the long-term. Sponsors are likely to flee, meaning the athletes will find it harder to make a living. More cynically, they'll also find it harder to pay the bribes needed to cover up failed tests.The most down to Earth take on the scandal's implications comes from British distance runner Jenny Meadows. In an interview with the BBC, she lamented the coming loss of sponsorship money and said she feared for the future of competitive athletics. She also cast doubt on whether we'll ever know the full extent of the Russian scandal."A lot of organizations do have their image of the sport to protect," Meadows said. "Therefore, we might never get 100 percent, you know, accuracy of the scale of doping. This is as big as the doping scandal in cycling, you know. This is just going to blow the sport apart, unfortunately."What can be done? As Peter Vigneron explained over at Outside, the system by which athletes are tested is deeply flawed. It's practically designed to facilitate conflicts of interest, because the federations that support the athletes are often involved in policing those same athletes. And when the IAAF takes over, things are no better. Its doping program, which is about as opaque as possible, is likely rife with bribery.So, Meadows is right to be worried. The scandal could be big enough to "blow apart" the sport. Blowing it up might be the only way out. At the very least, the entire anti-doping structure needs reform. Athletics needs an independent, international testing apparatus. The World Anti-Doping Association, as Vigneron explains, doesn't yet fill that role. But until it or some other organization does, expect the sport of athletics to continue its long, slow slide into oblivion.
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