When Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979,
the US vowed to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Neither the American people nor I
will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.
Another 64 countries boycotted the Olympics that year.
From the space race to nuclear weapons,
the US and Russia fought a war of influence
that also struck the world of sports.
Of course, drugs got involved,
and so it became very much bound up in this larger cultural
and scientific rivalry between the two superpower blocs.
The Olympic stage had always been a place
for countries to exude nationalistic pride.
But in this Cold War tension,
sports became another no-limits battleground for the US and Russia.
And that war lives on today.
For decades, it seems, Russian Olympic athletes
have been secretly doping to gain a competitive edge.
Hundreds of athletes have been caught doping over the years.
Russia took it a step further.
Rampant doping at the Sochi Olympics in 2014
were disclosed in the Oscar-winning documentary
when Grigory Rodchenkov,
the director of Russia’s National Anti-Doping Laboratory,
exposed widespread use and state-sponsored funding
of performance-enhancing drugs to Russian athletes.
We are top-level cheaters.
If all this can be proved, it’s quite mind-blowing.
-New York Times is breaking tomorrow. -Tomorrow!
An independent review commissioned in the wake of the scandal,
known as the McLaren Report,
would reveal the extent of the doping program,
which led to the complete ban of Russian athletes from competition
for four years in 2019.
That recommendation came from WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The ban has since been reduced to a symbolic two years,
meaning Russian athletes will still be able to
compete under a neutral status at the Tokyo Games.
The Russian flag and anthem, however, are still banned until 2022.
Some Olympians are crying foul, angry at the missed opportunity
to punish the flagrant use of performance-enhancing drugs
that has plagued the sports world for decades.
It’s the athletes and the fans and other competitors that suffer
because they know if a single athlete gets caught,
it doesn’t matter because there’ll be another one waiting in line.
As fans become callous to the use of doping in sports,
why has WADA,
the organization meant to crush the use of drugs in athletics,
failed to stamp out this endemic issue?
And why have Russian athletes been given a second chance to compete
following such blatant use of performance-enhancing drugs?
This is the story of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s system error.
[System Error]
As doping in professional sports
became more common through the 80s and 90s,
a scandal that would come to be known as the Festina Affair
rocked the cycling world in 1998.
The scandal began last week when the Festina team masseur
was stopped on the France-Belgium border,
and in his car, customs found a stash of anabolic steroids
and also the banned hormone EPO,
which helps the flow of oxygen in the blood
and is very difficult to detect.
International sports federations were saying, “Oh my God,
if this can happen to cycling,
this could happen to me, in my sport.”
The International Olympic Committee
decided to create an independent anti-doping agency
which took shape in the form of WADA.
Many governments didn’t trust the IOC.
They said you can’t be the poacher and the gamekeeper.
You can’t be promoting the world’s biggest sport event
and also be regulating the behavior of those who take part in it.
The compromise was the establishment of WADA.
They were very reluctant to give any power to WADA
to actually regulate things.
The idea of having an independent agency looking over their shoulder,
particularly in matters like doping,
was very uncomfortable to them.
WADA was founded in 1999
and would be constructed around the World Anti-Doping Code.
You've got 206 National Olympic committees, 206 governments,
40 or 50 international federations, and the IOC,
and all with different rules or no rules.
It was a complete mess.
So we said one of the first things we had to do
is get everybody singing off the same song sheet.
And WADA has made an impact in its 22-year history.
For the first time, we now have a document which is global.
It sets a standard for all sports event organizers,
all international federations, all governments to adhere to.
It started off an investigation into what are people using out there.
Anabolic steroids, peptide hormones, post-radiation treatment.
It increases red blood cells.
Boop, light goes on, red blood cells,
more oxygen to the muscles.
Let’s see whether there’s a non-therapeutic application
for this sort of thing.
We now have a pretty high degree of cooperation with the pharma industry.
They trust WADA.
They’re prepared to tell us what molecules they’re working on
and what they think that some of the side effects could be
in terms of doping.
In 2020, WADA’s budget was $37 million,
a small sum for an international organization
meant to oversee a global anti-doping program.
Half of the money comes from its 206 member countries.
The other half, which is matched dollar for dollar,
comes from the IOC,
amounting to 2 percent of the IOC annual budget.
The income that comes into the IOC
is derived from a product which they promote as being fun, youthful,
exciting and clean, relatively clean.
You’d think they would want to invest more money
in ensuring the maintenance of the value of that product.
As an international organization,
WADA has the gargantuan task of taking drugs out of sports.
But with a staff of 143 and a relatively small budget,
its ability to conduct investigations that go beyond simple drug testing
and that can have a real impact on
the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes is limited.
None of the laboratories are WADA laboratories,
but they're all accredited by WADA.
That means WADA oversees the labs but isn’t actually doing the testing.
Back in 2011,
in an anonymous survey commissioned by WADA
at the World Championships in South Korea,
30 percent of athletes admitted to doping in their careers,
but only 0.5 percent were ever caught at the event.
When an athlete dopes, you have to look at their support personnel
rather than the athlete themselves.
Was the athlete pressured?
How’s the system in that country?
Sometimes they act alone.
In some cases, you have the entire state involved in the doping program,
as was demonstrated with the Russians.
They're not alone, by the way,
but the more closed the country,
the more difficult it is to get reliable evidence.
While Russia was caught red-handed
and had become the poster child for state-sponsored doping,
athletes from countries around the world
have also been caught doping,
including the US, China, and Turkey.
Back in 2014, at the Sochi Games,
Russia engaged in a sophisticated doping scheme
that would be revealed to the world
by the lead scientist behind the doping operation, Grigory Rodchenkov,
ahead of the games in Rio.
He was directed by his supervisors
to devise a system to allow Russian athletes to cheat
even before he accepted the job
as the head of the Russian anti-doping lab.
Many of those drugs were very dangerous.
He devised a system that was a safer system for athletes to take.
And so when Russia got the Sochi Winter Olympics for 2014,
this is when the system was fully operational
because Russia controlled all of the internal processes to test athletes.
Any positive samples given during the games
were smuggled out of the official lab through a hole drilled in the wall
by the Russian Secret Service.
Ultimately, Russia dropped out of
its first place position it earned at Sochi
as medals continued to be stripped from the podium.
The McLaren Report, an independent investigation commissioned by WADA,
would later reveal at least 1,000 athletes
had taken performance-enhancing drugs.
WADA is divided into two components.
There’s essentially what I consider the politicians,
and then there’s the staff.
I don’t have a very positive experience
with the leadership of WADA.
I don’t think that they did nearly enough to protect Dr. Rodchenkov
and to protect other whistleblowers.
It’s hard to believe you’re doing something wrong
when everybody around you says it’s right
and there’s no other way that you’re shown.
The IOC is interested in earning money and hosting games,
and it needs big countries like Russia to host them.
It's supposed to be this place where we put politics aside
and let sports happen to try to unite the world.
But where you have people that are systematically cheating
and you don't do anything meaningful to deter it,
all that does is encourage more people to cheat.
Although the Russian doping scandal made headlines around the world,
it was not the only time WADA had failed to stop doping in sports.
The global governing body of cycling
has just announced moments ago it will ban Armstrong for life
and strip him of his seven tour titles.
But WADA can't actually punish bad behavior.
It can only recommend sanctions.
We got to the point where WADA is allowed to propose the sanctions.
In the case of Russia,
our proposal is that you’d be suspended for four years,
can't bid for anything, can't host anything.
And if you agree with that, that’s fine.
If you disagree, it goes directly to CAS.
The lakeside city of Lausanne is home to the IOC
as well as the IOC’s second independent body, the CAS,
the Court of Arbitration for Sport,
which is where country members go when they want to appeal a decision
and is where Russia got its ban reduced to two years.
It was CAS, the Court of Arbitration for Sport
that agreed with all of the findings and the evidence,
including direct linkage to Vladimir Putin,
but it determined that a two-year ban would be sufficient.
Personally, I don't agree with that.
Here’s a country that went for ten or more years,
totally devastating the entire system of fair competition,
destroying the lives and athletic careers
of all kinds of other athletes.
And for that, they get a two-year ban.
Both WADA and CAS are supposed to be independent bodies
free to recommend punishments for country members that behave badly.
However, they have often been led by current
or former senior members of the IOC,
including Craig Reedie, John Coates, and Thomas Bach,
presenting a potential conflict of interest.
As athletes and fans gear up for this year’s Olympics in Tokyo,
WADA’s limited budget and power to enforce the rules
will mean performance-enhancing drugs
will likely still be a part of the show.
The dream version would be an adequately funded organization
that has the power to impose sanctions
in the case of anti-doping.
While WADA could be stronger,
I think it’s done a remarkably good job in its 20 years,
and sport is cleaner and better for it.
If WADA could be the perfect form of itself,
it would be essentially like the FBI.
It would be an agency that didn’t report to the IOC,
seek meaningful cooperation from countries
that were suspected of running a state-sponsored doping system.
It would have the power to ban them
and it would have the power to at least assess penalties
against government officials, doctors, coaches,
and athletes that engage in doping.