Putin’s Doping Denialism Only Hurts Russia’s Athletes

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- On Dec. 9, the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, may ban Russia from major international sports events for the next four years. This is, effectively, a reaction to one of the defining qualities of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Its inability to admit that it’s ever done anything wrong or to apologize when faced with proof of wrongdoing.

The ban, which would cover next year’s Olympics in Tokyo and the 2022 soccer World Cup in Qatar, has been proposed by WADA’s compliance committee. If the proposal is approved by the organization’s executive committee, the Russian flag won’t be flown at any major international competition; Russian officials will be excluded; and Russian athletes can only compete if they prove they’ve never taken forbidden substances, and even then under a neutral flag.

The latest developments are an echo of an old scandal. Russia was first accused of running a government-sponsored doping system for athletes in 2014, the year of the Sochi Winter Olympics, Putin’s $50 billion extravaganza that was meant to signal Russia’s return as a global power. The accusations were in part fueled by the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the Moscow doping lab of Rusada, the national antidoping agency. His flight to the U.S. after the lab was declared noncompliant by WADA is documented in the Oscar-winning film “Icarus.”

From the start, Russia has refused to recognize that its sports officials systematically promoted and concealed doping. Putin has repeatedly labeled Rodchenkov as a crook and as mentally unstable, blaming him for any isolated incidents of doping that may have occurred. A criminal investigation into Rusada and the Moscow lab was launched, but not with the goal of cleaning up Russian sports: Instead, investigators went after the former lab director, who was charged in absentia with drug trafficking in late 2017.

Meanwhile, Rusada got a new chief: Yuriy Ganus, an experienced private-sector manager who saw his new job as a crusade to restore the reputation of Russian sports after the national team was forced to fly a neutral flag at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics last year. Under his management, Rusada was reinstated by WADA in Sept. 2018, but only conditionally. The most important condition was that WADA be given access to the Moscow lab’s old database and store of urine samples, all sealed by the Russian investigators. 

In Dec. 2018, Ganus addressed Putin directly, calling for the database to be handed over: “It’s very difficult to regain trust when the ghosts of the past hamper our progress.”

So early this year, WADA received the database. But when it compared the copy it received with a 2015 copy that had been provided by “a whistleblower,” presumably Rodchenkov, it found thousands of entries missing or altered. It also found that many alterations were made recently, in 2018 and 2019.

Ganus, whose team had had no access to the database or the old samples, blew a fuse. In the last few months, has has given a series of angry interviews to Russian and Western news outlets, predicting that Russia would be disqualified from international sports and calling on Russian officials, including Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov. While the minister has denied that the database has been manipulated, Ganus has not attempted to contradict WADA’s conclusions. He has speculated that the changes had been made on the orders of someone powerful enough to access the database while it was sealed by investigators, perhaps to cover up doping violations by well-known athletes, some of whom have since become legislators or government officials.

It’s heartening that a relatively minor Russian sports official doesn’t want to engage in this ham-handed coverup, even as people in much higher positions maintain the fiction that the doping scandal is a politicized Western plot against Russia. 

“There are those who want to put Russia on the defensive, to make it a culprit,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said of the WADA compliance committee’s ruling on Tuesday. “It doesn’t work this way — that one or two countries, say, Russia and China, are to blame for everything and are breaking all the rules, and the rest live by the rules they have written themselves without asking anyone.”

One could argue whether antidoping rules in high-achievement sports make sense and whether all top athletes really comply with them. But these rules aren’t impossible to follow, and their application isn’t visibly politicized. Substituting urine tests and messing with databases isn’t normal behavior, and it detracts from Russia’s greatness rather than bolster it in the eyes of the world. It makes sense that a nation where officials do this kind of thing and then complain about being treated unfairly by the West cannot wave its flag at big sports festivals. And it makes sense that athletes from such a nation are suspect — and that some of them, who are clean, may emigrate if the WADA ban comes into force.

If Putin really wanted to burnish Russia’s prestige, he could have ordered full transparency and admitted that doping had been systematic and that top officials have been involved. There’d be firings and prosecutions — and a promise to start with a clean slate. All of this should have happened back in 2014. It’s probably too late now to stave off consequences for Russia and its athletes, but it’s still not too late for a mea culpa and a complete change of approach. Alpha males don’t apologize, I know — but true leaders do.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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