The Olympic world is in mourning today. Cheating has been rewarded. Russia has been reinstated by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Honesty, honor and fair play have lost. The bad guys have won.
As was expected and feared, WADA, the world’s drug police, just allowed the most diabolical and massive state-sponsored doping machine this side of the old East Germany back into the good graces of the Olympic movement without satisfying all of the conditions that were required for its return.
Russia’s anti-doping agency was let off the hook even as Russian officials never publicly accepted the 2016 McLaren report, which detailed sample tampering and urine swapping at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and found that more than 1,000 Russian athletes were cheating in the nation’s far-reaching doping scheme.
Russia also never has given out the names of the officials who were to blame and has continued to refuse to turn over evidence of the cheating done in its Moscow laboratory.
What an awful decision this is, to allow a nation that so flagrantly violated the rules to return in this manner, without meeting the terms of the agreement, without showing any signs of contrition. WADA is supposed to be the first line of defense against cheating in world sport. On Thursday, it flimsily capitulated to its No. 1 enemy.
It will be impossible to take WADA seriously from now on, which means the foundation on which the Olympic Games stands – the concept of fair play, that the events you’re watching can be trusted — has now been shaken, perhaps irrevocably.
Since WADA is in such a ridiculously forgiving mood, why not give Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones and Ben Johnson a big hug and welcome them back too?
My goodness. What a devastating day this is for the thousands of athletes around the world who play by the rules, who have never taken a banned substance, who answer their doors from early morning to late at night to provide a urine sample to a surprise drug tester. Not everyone cheats. There are athletes doing things the right way. There are nations who subject their athletes to rigorous testing and report the results publicly.
But, because the International Olympic Committee and WADA are so preposterously beholden to Vladimir Putin and his $51 billion “gift” of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, their playing field will not be level. They will doubt most if not all Russian athletes at the starting line, in their races, in their games. And they should.
We all should. For all we know, the Russians continue to cheat. They continue to lie. And the world’s doping police just let them get away with it.
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