Russian Official May Or May Not Have Acknowledged Widespread Doping, And It Doesn't Matter

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that "Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes," which was exhaustively detailed in two reports earlier this month by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren. The money quote from the article came from the acting director general of Rusada, Russia's anti-doping agency, Anna Antseliovich: "It was an institutional conspiracy."

Today, Russian officials dispute this narrative, telling the BBC they did not admit to anything. Rusada claimed Antseliovich's words were "distorted," and that she was actually quoting the McLaren report itself.

Antseliovich agreed that her words had been "taken out of context." For what it's worth, the Kremlin is also questioning the Times's characterization of the interview, but says they "need to check on the authenticity" of the quotes.

Russia is trying to walk a very fine line where they say just enough to assuage doping regulators but not so much that they accept the McLaren Report. Ever since the doping revelations came to light, Russia's right to host international sporting events has been called into question. Just last week, Russia lost the hosting rights to biathlon and speed skating meets due to the McLaren Report revelations. This comes after having lost the 2017 bobsleigh and skeleton World Championships the week before. The Times surmised that Russia's supposed "drastic shift in tone" was motivated by a desire to get their anti-doping lab rectified so they could once again host events.

If that's the case, maybe Antseliovich's plan was to carefully choose her words during her interviews with the Times so any "confession" was, in fact, words taken straight from the McLaren Report, creating plausible deniability. If so, she's simply playing the game sporting regulators have created, by insisting Russia "accept the findings" of the McLaren Report—a completely childish stipulation with no practical purpose which will only further Russia's resentment of this whole affair, casting themselves as scapegoats for WADA's widespread failures to clean up sport.

Maybe the Times will produce evidence in the coming days that Antseliovich said more than initially published, but for now, it looks like she acknowledged the McLaren report exists, and that the words in its pages are real words. Is that an acceptance of the findings? Or is it an intentionally vague obfuscation?

The answer is Secret Option Three: these are all dumb questions that don't matter. As long as the IOC and their ilk are treating Russia like a bunch of children, let's continue with the analogy: when you catch a kid's arm elbow-deep in the cookie jar, what matters is not whether he admits it, but that you caught him.