IOC faces more pressure as it decides Russia's fate for Pyeongchang
For more than a year, the rhetorical lines have been drawn on whether Russia should be banned from the Olympics for operating a system of doping.
Some athletes and anti-doping leaders have been calling for such a ban since the lead-up to last summer’s Olympics in Rio. Russia, sport leaders and athletes have rebuffed those calls for a collective sanction.
On Tuesday, rhetoric will give way to action as the International Olympic Committee’s executive board will decide on sanctions for Russia at its meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its decision comes almost two months before the start of the Pyeongchang Olympics on Feb. 9.
For all the exhausting familiarity of a scandal that has roiled international sports for three years, the IOC is set to possibly take a new approach and stronger stance on Russia’s state-run system of doping athletes and subverting anti-doping controls, particularly at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
“I think they have to consider that a significant part of the world thinks they blew it in Rio by not acting,” Canadian IOC member Dick Pound said. “Now that they’ve had a chance to assess all the evidence, it’s really important that they be seen to act to protect the integrity of the Olympics.”
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The IOC could consider anything from a fine to a complete ban of the country, though many in sport and anti-doping are coalescing around a sanction that bans Russia but allows individuals to compete as neutral athletes.
Before deciding, the IOC will first receive a report from Samuel Schmid, who has been investigating the system of doping in Russia.
Last year, Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren produced an investigation that found a scheme of urine swapping through a hole in the wall in Sochi. The report, which was commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, included 28 Russian athletes who competed there and had evidence that showed their samples had been tampered with.
A separate IOC commission chaired by Denis Oswald has already disqualified results of 25 Russian athletes in Sochi, resulting in a loss of 11 medals.
The first reasoned decision of the Oswald Commission accepted McLaren’s findings and found Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow lab director who operated the system and provided much of the evidence of it, to be credible.
With one IOC commission accepting of those findings, the factors that led to the decision in Rio have changed. The IOC has done its investigations and is adjudicating cases. It is not in the time crunch it was last summer, when McLaren’s first report was released less than three weeks before the Olympics.
“This difference is that now we have had the opportunity to follow due process and we have had the opportunity to give everybody a fair hearing,” IOC President Thomas Bach said last month at the European Olympic Committees (EOC) General Assembly, Inside the Games reported.
“Now, and this is the most important difference, maybe, it is about what happened at the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014. Now it is about us. Now it is about the integrity of the Olympic Games.”
Before Rio, the IOC opted not to ban Russia. Instead, it gave criteria about the eligibility of athletes and left the decisions to the international federations that govern each sport. A majority of the Russia delegation ended up competing.
“I think if the IOC ducks its own responsibility yet again, it will have no credibility left,” Pound said. “If it’s not going to do that, why do you need the IOC?”
The IOC hasn’t echoed its pre-Rio stance of balancing collective responsibility with individual justice, but the latter is likely to weigh into the decision.
A more likely scenario is that the IOC suspend the Russian Olympic Committee while creating a path for individuals who can demonstrate their anti-doping record to compete as neutral athletes. That would mean no Russian flag at the Olympics and no Russian anthem should an athlete win a gold medal.
“I would never say you should punish clean athletes, but I think allowing clean athletes to prove that they’re clean and compete under a neutral flag would be an elegant solution,” U.S. biathlete Lowell Bailey said. “You’re talking about state-sponsored doping. That needs to be dealt with and punished accordingly.”
That option is favored by 37 National Anti-Doping Organizations, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
Russian officials, including ROC president Alexander Zhukov, have said they will boycott such a decision by the IOC.
“I don’t think it’s helping the cause, but I don’t think it’s going to be a factor,” IOC member Richard Peterkin said of the threat of the boycott. “It’s not going to make people angry on the (executive board) to make an emotional decision. I think it’ll just be totally ignored.”
Ostensibly, the IOC has other options on the table.
It could ban the country entirely and not leave an option for any Russians to compete, a sanction that Pound, who is also a former WADA president, favors.
Such a ban is not without precedent, though sanctioning Russia this way would represent the first time it was done for subverting anti-doping rules.
Germany and Japan were not invited to the Games following the World Wars. South Africa saw its invitation rescinded for the 1964 Olympics after failing to denounce apartheid.
In 2015, the IOC suspended Kuwait after accusing its government of interfering with its national Olympic committee.
As the commissions have progressed their work in the 18 months since the IOC was last faced with this decision, the pressure has only increased on the IOC and how it handles one of the world’s great sporting powers.
Said U.S. Biathlon president and CEO Max Cobb, “The best thing for the IOC to do is ignore the noise and focus on finding a just and proportional response.”