Photo finish for Russian Olympic participation

The International Olympic Committee has put off a decision on banning all Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics which start in just 16 days time.  Its members have received the World Anti-Doping Agency’s report into systematic drugs cheating sponsored at ministerial level in Moscow and carried out with the help of the Russian secret services, the FSB.  Instead of immediately blocking Russian participation in the Olympics they have called for retesting of samples taken from all Russian athletes who competed in the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. There can be no doubting the seriousness of this move. IOC officials seem concerned that Russia might bring court actions against them for compensation and defamation. It has been suggested that if they were permitted to take part in the Games, all Russian athletes should have to submit to a drugs test immediately upon their arrival and before they could take part in any events.  There are, however, questions about the ability of the anti-doping arrangements in Brazil to cope with such an extra workload. There are indeed also questions about the practicality of all the Sochi results for Russian athletes being re-tested in the coming days. Given that the WAPA has already done much of this and decided that many of the samples submitted for testing had been switched and were false, it is hard to see what useful purpose the IOC’s reexamination of the result would achieve. If the thinking is that it would buy the IOC time and put off a fateful decision, then the Olympics’ governing body has made a serious miscalculation. This is because it is not simply the interests of Russian athletes that have to be taken into account.  Competitors from all over the world have spent four arduous years preparing for Rio. Among them will be a few who hope to get away with cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs and other ruses. But the great majority are coming to the Games relying only on their own physical prowess. It is not hard to imagine their feelings of despair when they think that they may still be up against competitors whose success will have been achieved fraudulently.  Public confidence in the governing bodies of sports such as cycling and football has been shattered by their failures to police and run them properly. The IOC has already been mired in controversy over the way it conducted itself under the long rule of Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio Samaranch.  It needs to understand that the issue of Russian athletes and state-sponsored doping is crucial to its standing. It risks serious reputational damage which will surely spill over into the Rio Games which are under enough pressure as it is.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that any officials guilty of cheating will be fired. But he has also suggested that the accusations leveled against his country’s athletics officials are politically motivated. One of his ministers has said that the WADA report was inspired by Washington.  The IOC finds itself is a terrible place, but it needs to bite the bullet. The re-testing of results that it has ordered is likely to be chaotic and thus inconclusive.  It will be a tragedy for Russian athletes if they are banned from Rio. But then many would argue that it will be a tragedy for world athletics if they are not.