Visits: 4
The vote last week by the World Anti-Doping Agency to allow Russia to return to the international sports fold has laid bare the deep fissures within the community of athletes and officials who oversee the world’s competitions.
In the days since the decision to take Russia off the top antidoping organization’s list of noncompliant countries, dozens of current and former athletes and leaders of national antidoping agencies, largely from Western nations, have voiced their frustration with WADA for what they see as letting Russia off the hook after it corrupted years of international events, including the 2014 Winter Olympics.
In what amounted to a series of emergency meetings, Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, spent Wednesday in Washington with a contingent of other antidoping supporters, including Linda Hofstad Helleland, the vice president of WADA who voted against clearing the Russians, and Emma Coburn, an Olympic bronze medalist in track and field. They rushed from appointment to appointment, talking to lawmakers and government officials about the need for WADA reform.
They spent the morning at the White House in discussions with Jim Carroll, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and then headed to Capitol Hill for sit-downs with representatives and senators.
Helleland, a Norwegian politician who was one of the two dissenters in the 9-2 vote for Russia’s reinstatement, was in New York for meetings at the United Nations, and said she added a day in Washington onto her business trip because this was a critical time in the history of antidoping.
“Antidoping hasn’t been on the agenda of political leaders, but now they are paying attention because the Russia situation has been a big wake-up call,” said Helleland, who plans to run for WADA president next year. “I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in sports right now. Athletes everywhere are telling me that they’ve lost their belief in antidoping. It’s so painful for me to hear, and we’ve got to do something about it right now.”
With the United States set to host the Olympics in 2028, Tygart said there was a new opportunity for the federal government to focus on worldwide antidoping.
“Our government is going to invest a lot of time and money into the Games here, and it should want those Games to be clean,” Tygart said, adding that worldwide governments’ sudden interest in antidoping “is a silver lining in this very dark cloud.”
Coburn, an American runner who was the 2017 world champion in steeplechase, said athletes understand they need to come together to do the work that WADA was supposed to do to ensure fair play.
“WADA failed its athletes by promoting cheating and rewarding countries that are cheating and stealing our medals, our money and our memories,” she said. “With the Russia drama, we’re seeing more and more athletes speak out.”
At issue is whether WADA should have removed Russia from the list of noncompliant countries before Russia met two requirements for reinstatement: admit to state-sponsored doping that involved the highest state authorities and turn over all the computer data and thousands of possibly tainted biological samples collected from athletes.
Jonathan Taylor, chairman of WADA’s compliance review committee, said he understood the frustration of those who felt Russia didn’t show enough contrition and “say there should’ve been a greater mea culpa.”
“But we do have explicit acknowledgment from the Russians,” he added.
In voting to take Russia off its noncompliant list without requiring the country to admit state-sponsored doping, WADA received a commitment from Russia to turn over the computer data and the samples by December 31, an assurance that WADA officials say they did not previously have.
When it became clear how WADA would vote, Beckie Scott, an Olympic champion cross-country skiier from Canada, resigned in protest from her post on WADA’s compliance review committee. At the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, Scott finished third in the five-kilometer pursuit but was later awarded gold after two Russians were stripped of their medals for doping. After the vote, Victoria Aggar, a Paralympic rower on the athlete committee, called it “the most devastating day in the history of antidoping.”
What has become clear since the vote is that tension between athletes and sports officials — especially those connected to the International Olympic Committee, which has pushed for Russia’s reinstatement — has been growing for some time.
At a meeting ahead of the WADA vote last week in the Seychelles, Scott attempted to make a spirited defense of her position that Russia had not done enough to be cleared and was roundly criticized.
“Athletes should know their place,” said one official, according to people present at the meeting.
Edwin Moses, the chairman of WADA’s education committee and the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said officials attacked Scott verbally when she challenged them. He added that a WADA member had described Scott, a fierce anti-doping advocate, as “emotional.”
“I think it was very sexist,” Moses said. “A lot of women came up to me afterward. It’s not right, it’s beyond the dignity of the committee and it’s been going on awhile.”
Moses, who won two Olympic gold medals and 122 consecutive 400-meter hurdles races in the 1970s and 1980s, did not fare much better. At a meeting in May, Patrick Baumann, a Swiss official who leads basketball’s international governing body and sits on a number of I.O.C. panels, told Moses he was not entitled to speak during a discussion about Russia’s fate.
Taylor, the British lawyer leading the WADA committee that is looking into Russian compliance, initially said Russia needed to do more be taken off the noncompliant list, specifically by making a commitment to provide access to data required to analyze 10,000 suspicious samples.
Documents have shown that Russia was unwilling to make the commitment ahead of last week’s meeting, then reversed course at the last minute, leading Taylor’s committee to change its recommendation. That led to furious complaints from athlete groups largely from North America and Western Europe.
WADA’s executive committee is split between government representatives and I.O.C.-appointed sports officials, with the two groups each responsible for 50 percent of the agency’s budget. The only athlete representative with a decision-making role on the executive committee was Danka Bartekova, a member of the I.O.C.’s own athlete commission.
WADA’s president, Craig Reedie, is also an I.O.C member.
“I’ve tried consistently to be an independent and neutral chairman,” Reedie said. “And I have been bruised on a number of occasions, not the least by the I.O.C.”
Seven members of the WADA athlete commission led by Scott signed a letter ahead of the crucial meeting that said, “It should not be possible to commit the biggest doping scandal of the 21st century, then be reinstated without completing the conditions set.”
Among those not to sign the letter was Kirsty Coventry, a former swimmer, who is also the chairwoman of the I.O.C.’s athletes commission. Her group released its own statement, which supported Russia’s return.
“I believe our mandate is to protect all clean athletes, and I believe there are clean Russian Athletes,” Coventry’s statement said.
Mark Adams, chief spokesman for the I.O.C., said in a statement that the athletes on its commission, who are elected by their peers, were “the ones that best represent the views of athletes globally.” The members of the WADA athlete commission are appointed.
Moses said when he was first nominated to the I.O.C.’s athletes’ commission decades ago, he was told the organization wanted him to be an independent thinker. “That’s not the case anymore,” he said.
Russia has gone to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to lift its ban from international track and field events, a separate punishment from WADA’s penalties.
David Howman, who was WADA’s chief executive from 2003 to 2016, said the organization had changed from “being an organization that cared about clean athletes to one that cares about international federations that have not been able to stage events in Russia.”
“It’s money over principle,” he added. “That is a quite a difference, quite a swing, from what WADA once was.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the WADA position from which Beckie Scott resigned. She resigned from her post on WADA’s compliance review committee, not from her position as chairwoman of the athlete committee. The error was repeated in a caption.