In the early hours of Monday morning, the leaders of the International Olympic Committee convened to discuss the banning of the Russian Olympic team from the upcoming games. Over the course of three hours, they had the chance to come to a conclusion that could change the future of sport forever. Yet, whether or not they were scared of a political backlash, failed to impose their authority on the grandest stage.
The decision of whether or not Russia was to be entirely banned from the Rio Olympics was the biggest in Olympic history to date. By not imposing a blanket ban on Russia for the upcoming Olympics, the IOC wasted the greatest opportunity to finally cut doping out of top-level international sport. Instead, they passed on the responsibility to the governing bodies of each sport. In the most defining moment of their history, the IOC unsurprisingly wet the bed.
This decision confirmed my many fears. The IOC showed that they are nothing more than a fabricated collective of two-faced money launderers. By doing so, they joined the exclusive list of irrelevant, corrupt governing bodies, alongside FIFA and the ICC. What an honour. Like their counterparts, they specialise in cashing cheques and taking bribes, but are not overly keen on actual work and decision-making such as this.
Now don’t get it twisted. My views are not politically motivated. I get no satisfaction out of watching Putin and Russia crumble. I’m not a fanatical westerner writhing in glee when challengers to the throne fall to the wayside. I’m a Kiwi who knows that no global superpower either knows where we are, or gives a shit anyway. I look at this in only a sporting context. Russia committed arguably the greatest crime in sport – state-funding a doping program. There can be no excuses, no ways around it. It happened and they should have been punished accordingly. People argue that banning the entire team would be unfair to those athletes with clean records. However, these athletes still could have still competed—but they would have done so as independents, rather than under a Russian flag.
Doping programmes are not just a way of bending the rules and producing better results. It literally warps reality. Back before most of us were born, a similar scandal took place in East Germany for nearly two decades, with the truth only emerging once the nation disbanded in the early 1990s. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the East Germans systematically pumped their athletes full of hormones and steroids. The result? They became one of the most dominant sporting nations on the globe, even occasionally nudging out the United States on the medal count. Millions of people watched those events unfold, and were only told of the lies years later. But saying it was false does not erase it from memory or reality. That stuff happened—ask your parents—and some records still stand to this very day.
I guess what I’m saying is that doping creates a false illusion of the reality we watch on television. As Kiwis, we have experienced this ourselves. Just four years ago Valerie Adams was robbed of a gold medal in London, thanks to a not-so-clean Bulgarian. Sure, Adams goes in the record books as having won, but we can never erase what we saw. We didn’t watch her win. We saw her standing on the second-place podium, crying in disappointment. That image does not simply get erased nor replaced.
Of course, Russia is not the only nation that have drugged-up athletes. Almost every nation has, at the very least, someone in the same position. There’s no doubt in my mind that there are several US athletes that have snuck under the radar. In fact, sprinter Justin Gatlin was caught a couple of years ago, but for some reason was allowed back into the sport. In the past, the likes of Marion Jones, Carl Lewis, and ‘Flo-Jo’, have either been caught or been suspected of doping. The fact of the matter is, this was an opportunity to cut out doping, as the athletes would have seen the dire consequences that it brings.
Yet here we are. The Russians have been given a slap on the wrist, which in my eyes will only help encourage dopers to continue their cheating exploits. How are we to know whose clean and who’s not? We’ve all seen the amazing performances of both Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, but how are we to know if that was reality or just an illusion? Having just witnessed a major injustice, it’s unlikely that we will ever know.