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Eastern Europe
February 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 18
Russia's sports establishment remains too hard a nut to crack
Carmen Valache in Berlin
On the last stretch before the Winter Olympics start in PyeongChang, South Korea, on February 9, Russia received a partial vindication in the dop- ing scandal engulfing its athletes since the previ- ous Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.
On February 1, the world's top sports court overturned a lifetime ban placed on 28 Russian Olympians after Sochi, reinstated their previously stripped medals and allowed them to participate in this year's Olympics, because the evidence against them was insufficient.
In Moscow, the ruling of the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was hailed as a confirmation of the country's position, which has been to deny allegations of doping in spite of abundant proof to the contrary. "This, of course, cannot but give us joy. [...] It confirms our position on the fact that the vast majority of our athletes are clean," President Vladimir Putin boasted.
Putin and his cabinet have long complained that the Russian doping scandal was nothing but a po- litical conspiracy against the country. While he him- self admitted that some Russian athletes may have been doping, Putin has denied the existence of a state-sponsored doping programme in Russia and compared the likelihood of doping among Russian athletes to that among athletes everywhere.
However, numerous whistle-blowers from within Russia would beg to differ. As early as 2010, Vitaly Stepanov, an employee of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) began sending information to
Bryan Fogel's (right) search for the best doping coach leads him to Grigory Rodchenkov (left), the head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory.
the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) about Rus- sia's systematic doping programme. Russian dis- cus throwing Olympian Darya Pishchalnikova also emailed WADA in 2012 with similar allegations, but her emails were ignored and she was later stripped of her medals and barred from the sport for a decade by the Russian Sports Federation.
Then, in December 2014, a documentary broad- cast by German television channel ARD finally prompted people to take notice. Since then, nu- merous investigative reports, including the fa- mous McLaren doping report commissioned by WADA and published in 2016, have revealed time and again that Russia has indeed been doping its athletes for years.
“Icarus”, a documentary by American playwright and actor Bryan Fogel that premiered in January 2017, has brought the Russian doping scandal
to the attention of consumers of popular culture everywhere. That is not least because the Netflix- backed documentary is currently contending for an Oscar award for best documentary feature.
In many ways, “Icarus” – named after the Greek mythological character who flew too close to the sun and paid for it with his life – is an unlikely expose of Russia's doping scandal. In a credible, though not always subtle manner, Fogel docu- ments what started as a pet project to replicate disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong's feat of win- ning cycling races by doping. An amateur cyclist, Fogel decides to inject himself with performance- enhancing drugs and then participate in an