The World Anti-Doping Agency released a report last week that confirms the extraordinary extent of Russia’s sports doping program. The scandal not only affects various events over the years in which Russian athletes have won, or appeared to have won, but also calls into question the integrity of many other international sporting events.
The confirmation is the result of a comprehensive, five-month study by the reputable organization. Some 1,000 athletes, part of a Russian government program presumably authorized at the highest level – as in, by President Vladimir Putin because of its importance – benefited from systematic, illegal, performance-enhancing doping in some 30 sports.
Russian athletes benefited from this practice at events such as the 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 did not also juice its athletes. An offshoot of the problem is that other countries, seeing that the competition against their athletes was doping, would ask themselves why they shouldn’t do likewise.
Doping not only turns international athletic competitions into bad jokes, it also does short- and long-term damage to the health of the athletes doing it.
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.
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