Sport, Drugs and Cheating

If a pill or injection could make you the best in your field, would you take it? Even if that was cheating and might damage your health? For the likes of Lance Armstrong and Ben Johnson, and — apparently — Russia's Ministry of Sports, the answer was “bring it on.” The temptation is only heightened when state-of-the-art stimulants are undetectable in the latest drug tests. But the advantage in this long-running cat-and-mouse game may be swinging back toward anti-doping authorities, thanks to the prolonged storage of test samples. That’s allowed specimens to be reanalyzed using newer technologies, resulting in the nabbing of dozens of abusers who thought they had gotten away with it. Combine that threat with the ever-present risk from whistle-blowers, and drug cheats may rest a little less easy.

Russia was barred from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar— the latest punishments for a doping program that climaxed at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia. Officials there were accused of fabricating evidence to cover up the use of banned substances by the country’s athletes. The four-year international sports ban, imposed in December by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), also stands to rule Russia out of the 2020 European Championships and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. As happened at the 2018 Winter Games, individual Russian athletes who comply with strict conditions will be allowed to compete under a neutral flag. Since placing first in the medals table in Sochi, Russia has been stripped of 13 of its 33 medals as the scale of its doping program emerged. An independent investigation commissioned by WADA found that Russian sports officials oversaw a vast program to manipulate doping test results from 2011 to 2015, and that athletes’ positive urine samples were swapped out during the Sochi Olympics. Allegations of Russian state-sponsored doping were first leveled in 2016 by a whistle-blower who ran the Moscow laboratory responsible for Olympic drug testing. The latest four-year ban follows the discovery by experts of anomalies in drug test results recovered from a Moscow laboratory in January, under an agreement in September 2018 to lift a previous three-year ban. Separately, Russia’s track and field team was barred from the 2016 Rio Olympics following revelations by a whistle-blowing runner. Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled the athlete “Judas” and has described the allegations of state-directed doping as a U.S. conspiracy. The analysis of stored samples is becoming an increasingly effective backup for anti-doping authorities: Close to 100 athletes — including at least 40 medalists — were snared using samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Summer Olympics. Among the guilty parties, track and field, weightlifting and Russians dominated. But in a setback for the anti-doping movement, the highest sports court in 2018 overturned 28 life bans for Russian athletes, imposed by the Olympic authorities after forensic analysis of samples stored from the Sochi Games.