Russians cheat again, yet their athletes were given a spot in the Olympics

Was this Russian swimmer "probably not clean" -- yet he won the gold medal?

… banned from Olympics but did cheaters win?

I still remember the 1972 basketball game between the USSR and the US in the Olympics. 

They cheated then, and it has not stopped since even when the name was changed to Russia. 

Which brings us to the 2021 Olympics, a year later because of Covid, and asks this question:

Should athletes from the most nefarious, despicable country in the world be allowed to compete in the 2021 Olympics? 

That was the question before the International Olympic Committee, and they should receive an “F” for their failure to discipline a country that allowed its athletes to escape doping regulations.

Olympics should stand for fairness, but they have not for years, which is why I have not watched the Olympics for 30 years — until this year. 

When I saw the country listed as “ROC,” I asked my friend who that was. She had no idea. 

Xxx Murray knows and he expressed his disdain at being defeated by a person whom he alleges has cheated. 

So, what is the story here?

Background

Here is what occurred with the Russian government, which interfered in the 2016 American elections, with few ramifications, and have then hacked into American government and private business computers, with few ramifications. 

With the Olympics, the situation was clear-cut,

The Russian government, in an attempt to win international prestige through sport, concocted a complex, systemic, sinister program that allowed Russian athletes to evade doping regulations. The plot included, for example, a hole in the wall of a doping lab, through which officials would swap out dirty samples for clean ones. The scheme peaked in the buildup to the 2014 Winter Olympics, which Russia hosted.

In 2016, the World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned independent attorney Richard McLaren to investigate the program. McLaren found that more than 600 positive samples from athletes across at least 28 different sports had “disappeared.” So there had, clearly, been both widespread performance-enhancing drug use and an extensive cover-up. 

WADA now describes it as “a centralized doping and anti-detection scheme that had operated in Russia in the period from at least 2011 to 2015.”

Henry Bushnell, “Are Russian drug cheats at the Olympics? 

Here’s what we know,” Yahoo Sports, July 30, 2021

What were the ramifications?

So, if Russia has been banned from the Olympics, how were their athletes allowed to compete under the guise of the “Russia Olympic Committee.”

I guess that the IOC was not really the culprit here, but they could have taken a stronger stand than they did,

Various Russian officials, in both government and sporting positions, received suspensions or permanent bans. With respect to the actual Olympic Games themselves, though, punishments have been largely symbolic.

The country Russia has not been allowed to send official delegations to the last two Olympics, but hundreds of Russian athletes competed in PyeongChang in 2018 as “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” and hundreds are competing in Tokyo under the “Russian Olympic Committee” label.

The final decision on the punishment was made by the Court for Arbitration of Sport (CAS), against WADA recommendations, in late 2020. WADA had sought to bar Russia from all world championships, in all sports, for four years. CAS halved the ban to two years and watered it down.

In the decision, crucially, it said that authorities would allow “any athlete or athlete support personnel from Russia to participate in or attend the Olympic and Paralympic Games (winter or summer) and any world championships organized or sanctioned by a WADA signatory, on the condition that they are not subject to a suspension imposed by a competent authority, that the uniform worn does not contain the flag of the Russian Federation and contains the words “neutral athlete”, and that the Russian national anthem is not played or sung at any official event venue.”

 Henry Bushnell, Yahoo Sports, July 30, 2021

So, the punishment is that they are not allowed to wear a Russian flag?

Technically, not all Russian athletes are allowed to compete: Only those who are designated as “clean,” though how can we think that they have gone through a valid testing regimen?

In fact, WADA were denied access to the Russian testing,

As WADA explains it: “In order to be able to prosecute doping cheats that had benefited from the [scheme], WADA sought access to the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) of the Moscow Laboratory, as well as the underlying analytical data. For years, access to the data was consistently refused by the Russian authorities.”

Henry Bushnell, Yahoo Sports, July 30, 2021

So, when American swimmer Ryan Murphy complained after losing the 200-meter backstroke to Russian Evegeny Rylov, saying that he was “probably not clean,” the reality is that many of them are “probably” in the same boat. 

Which is another reason for me to never again watch the Olympics.