The World Anti-Doping Agency released a report last week that confirms the extraordinary extent of Russia’s sports doping program. The great problem with the scandal is that not only does it affect various events over the years in which Russian athletes have won, or appeared to have won, it also calls into question the integrity of many other international sporting events.
The confirmation is the results of a comprehensive, five-month study the reputable organization, led by Canadian Richard H. McLaren. Some 1,000 athletes, part of a Russian government program presumably authorized at the highest level — as in by President Vladimir Putin — due to its importance, benefited from systematic, illegal, performance-enhancing doping in some 30 sports.
Events at which athletes benefiting from this practice took place included Summer and Winter Olympic Games, including at Sochi in 2014, hosted by Russia, and the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London competitions.
None of this is new, of course. The East Germans, before the Iron Curtain fell of its own weight in 1989, used to be the poster boys and girls for the practice. There was no reason to think that the Soviet Union itself and other Warsaw Pact countries did not also juice their athletes to run up the gold, silver and bronze medals. Yet another problem of the practice is that other countries, seeing that the competition for their athletes was doping, would ask themselves why they shouldn’t go and do likewise.
It needs to be recalled that doping not only turns international athletic competitions into bad jokes, it also has short and long-term adverse effects on the health of the athletes doing it, not unlike the impact of football and hockey concussions on American athletes of various ages.
What needs to be done at this point is simply to ban all Russian athletes from all international competitions for a year, to make it clear that their past behavior is totally unacceptable. Anything short of that measure will simply be ignored by Moscow. It is even possible that, without strict, comprehensive action, the practice will continue, particularly as means of masking it become ever more sophisticated.
Anyone who thinks that sports boycotts don’t work should take a look at apartheid South Africa until it ended that heinous policy in 1994.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
