A late penaltyRussia’s overdue Olympic ban is no cure for anti-doping impotence

IT HAS taken seven investigative reports and seven years. But at long last the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided on December 5th to punish Russia for running a state-sponsored doping programme, by banning the country from taking a team to next February’s winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Russian athletes hoping to compete will have to do so carrying the Olympic flag and singing the Olympic anthem—if they can prove that they are clean. Though many countries have been excluded from past games for political reasons, and a couple have been suspended from individual sports for cheating, the exclusion of an entire national team for doping is without precedent. Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, was bullish when announcing yesterday’s sanctions, which “should draw a line under this damaging episode and serve as a catalyst for a more effective anti-doping system”.

The punishments are well-deserved, but Mr Bach’s claims that they will end the scandal and mark a new chapter in sport’s war on drugs are far-fetched. In Russia the IOC’s decision has been met with outrage and denial. Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the ban was part of a global attempt to isolate the country based on “unsubstantiated accusations”—and that Russia would survive the sanctions with the same defiance as it did the second world war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Vladimir Putin did not call for a total boycott of the games, though the argument that the punishment is a Western conspiracy against Russia may help him ahead of the next year’s election. The decision is more embarrassing for Vitaly Mutko, Mr Putin’s deputy and the former minister for sport, who has been barred from the Olympics for life. Mr Mutko is also in charge of next year’s football World Cup, which Russia is hosting. FIFA, the sport’s administrative body, has said that the IOC’s ruling will have no impact on preparations for the tournament. 

Even if Russia’s extensive doping programme has been shut down, the illegal advantages that it produced are likely to linger. Taking anabolic steroids could give athletes a permanent boost in muscle mass, according to scientists at the University of Oslo who have studied the effects of such drugs in mice. They argue that World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) should ditch its current maximum sentence of four years and introduce lifelong bans. WADA believes that such penalties would not stand up in court, and is awaiting further research into the impact of steroids on humans specifically. Until then, any Russians that might have juiced themselves up in the past but evaded detection since would probably continue to enjoy the benefits.

If Mr Bach’s hope that his punishments would put a stop to the Russian controversy was improbable, his description of an effective anti-doping system was implausible. More than seven years have passed since WADA learned from Vitaly Stepanov, a member of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency and the husband of middle-distance runner Yuliya Stepanova, that his employer was covering up government-approved cheating. Because the agency’s rules prevented it from conducting an inquiry, the couple’s detailed allegations were overlooked for four years. In the end it took an outsider, German journalist Hajo Seppelt, to produce the first investigation. In December 2014 the German broadcaster ARD aired his documentary about the conspiracy, which included Ms Stepanova’s secret recordings of corrupt doctors and coaches. Even then it took WADA almost a year to change its rules and produce its own report. Its first attempt in November 2015 presented accusations from workers at the Moscow testing laboratory who alleged that the director, Grigory Rodchenkov, had destroyed samples—but the investigation produced no smoking gun. A second report in January 2016 detailed corruption at the IAAF, without offering much extra information about Russia.

It was not until the third report appeared in July 2016 that WADA landed what looked like a knockout blow. It included a spreadsheet of doping protocols for Russian athletes at the 2014 winter games in Sochi, photographs of tampered bottles of urine, and instructions from Russian government officials athletes about drug-taking in several sports. Yet even with this vast trove of evidence the IOC did not issue a national suspension. It claimed that the two weeks between WADA’s third report and the start of the 2016 summer games in Rio de Janeiro left too little time in which to consider the finer details of each Russian athlete’s case—and that “individual justice, to which every human being is entitled, has to be applied”. If an athlete could prove that they had never failed a test outside of Russia, and if the governing body for their sport was willing to accept a Russian team, then they would be on the plane to Brazil. Only athletics and weightlifting implemented a national ban. Russia finished the games with 56 medals, putting them fourth in the table. By the end of the year, WADA had published its fourth and final report, which showed that the programme had involved more than 1,000 athletes across at least 30 sports between 2011 and 2015.

The IOC has toughened its stance since, and conducted two inquiries of its own: a general survey of corruption with the Russian Ministry of Sport and a specific investigation into athletes at the Sochi Olympics. Since the start of November it has stripped Russia of 11 medals that it fraudulently won at those games. Yet the tardiness of the recent punishments, given the proof that has been available for the best part of a decade, is discouraging. Though Russia’s doping programme was shockingly extensive, sport’s drug problem is much wider and less blatant. In August a team of nine sports scientists, with funding from WADA, published an anonymised survey of competitors at the Athletics World Championships in 2011. They found that 30% of respondents admitted to having used illegal drugs in the year before the competition, though just 0.5% of them failed tests during it. The tools that WADA uses to catch cheats have become more sophisticated since then. Traditional tests, which look for illegal substances in the blood or urine, return positive results in 1-2% of cases. That rate is 14% for biological passports, which measure sudden changes in athletic capacity and were first used for sanctions in athletics in 2012. Yet even these can be duped. In “Icarus”, a documentary film released in August that tracked Mr Rodchenkov’s path from Russia’s doping mastermind to an informant hiding in America, the doctor revealed his “micro-dosing” scheme: small, regular injections of a cocktail of drugs that the passport is not sensitive enough to detect.

It is also possible to beat the system without breaking the rules. WADA allows athletes to take performance-enhancing substances if they have a doctor’s note saying that they require them for medical reasons. In a 2013 study of 600 Danish athletes, half the respondents believed that rivals in their sport had gained such a therapeutic-use exemption (TUE) without a clinical need for it. Shortly after the Rio games a Russian group of hackers released records of WADA-approved TUEs for 66 prominent athletes, including runner Mo Farah, cyclist Chris Froome, tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams and gymnast Simone Biles. There is no suggestion that these athletes have committed any offences—though the hackers clearly hoped that their legal use of otherwise-banned substances would discredit an ailing anti-doping system further still.

With a budget of just $30m per year, WADA is wielding a knife in a highly-charged arms race. Even when it finds clear evidence of systematic doping, as it did in Russia nearly 18 months ago, there is no guarantee that the IOC will act on it quickly and decisively. It is possible that Russian athletes who have benefited from state-sponsored doping will be able to compete in Pyeongchang next February. It is certain that other drug cheats will be skating across the ice and snow. If any of them has been part of a national doping conspiracy, it may be years before it is discovered.