The US crusade against cheaters — and its risk

Travis Tygart, the U.S. anti-doping chief, went to Congress last week with a no-nonsense message: Push for a clampdown on the cheats who take podium moments away from genuine athletes and sully the Olympic movement. “This is not just about elite Olympic athletes,” Tygart told a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. “This is about every kid on a playground who has an Olympic dream and asks, ‘What do I have to do to make my dreams come true?’”

There’s really no one in the American Olympic movement who would disagree with that message, including the U.S. Olympic Committee. It’s just that, as The New York Times reports, the USOC would like Tygart to tone it down a notch. “At the end of the day, he’s doing his job, and he’s doing it really well,” said Scott Blackmun, USOC’s chief executive. “Would we like him to be a little bit more of a silver-tongued devil? Yes, we would.”

Why would the USOC want Tygart and the rest of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to soften their approach? Because the USOC has a different — and concurrent — lobbying mission in the works: convincing the International Olympic Committee to give the 2024 Summer Games to Los Angeles instead of Paris. And USOC officials are worried that IOC members will be put off by Tygart’s tough talk.

Indeed, it appears Tygart’s activism might be rankling the IOC. Longtime IOC member Gerhard Heiberg of Norway told the Times “it could be very difficult to have one nation getting involved in how we are handling doping and putting pressure on us.” Heiberg’s talking about American meddling, which, he adds, could have a negative influence on IOC members when they meet in September to pick the 2024 venue.

This is the same IOC that let Russia off the hook when it was shown that Moscow had for years engineered a state-sponsored doping program to help more than 1,000 of its athletes cheat in 30 sports from 2011 to 2015. Remember the seamy details? Steroids in whiskey for men, in vermouth for women. Dead-of-night exchanges of tainted urine and clean urine through a mouse hole. The IOC could have banned Russia from Rio, and instead passed the buck to individual sports federations. Some of those federations let cheaters compete.

But the IOC is the ultimate arbiter of venues for future Olympiads. Getting the Games could be a big-bucks coup for LA and the U.S., which hasn’t hosted the Olympics since 2002, when Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Games. Organizers say hosting the Games would mean an $11.2 billion boost and 74,000 new full-time jobs for the local economy. The USOC yearns for redemption following failed bids by New York and, ahem, Chicago.

If La La Land got the Games, we’d sing and dance in celebration. But we have a problem with the queasiness roiling the USOC over Tygart’s tough talk. The U.S. Olympic movement should be lockstep-unified in support of stricter regulations for doping. And if that means irking IOC members, and perhaps sacrificing LA’s chances to win the 2024 bid, so be it.

The Olympics are meaningless if performances are tainted. Faster, Higher, Stronger, the Olympic motto, means next to nothing when pharmacology supplies the winning edge.

In all, 35 Russian athletes have been stripped of Olympic medals since 2002, most as a result of retroactive testing that followed Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren’s sweeping investigation into Russia’s doping program.

Tygart was right to put this on Congress’ agenda: The U.S. government has a financial stake in reforms, contributing $2 million annually to the World Anti-Doping Agency.

And the USOC? It shouldn’t’ conflate Tygart’s clean-sports crusade with its desire to snatch the 2024 Games for Los Angeles. A venue is important, but never more important than the purity of sport — the sense of fair play that has to undergird every competition. Otherwise, why take part? Why watch?

— Chicago Tribune