Imagine the most stereotypically Russian way an Olympic doping scandal could play out. Are you thinking sketchy FSB agents? Passing urine samples back and forth through a hole in a wall … hidden behind a cabinet in a laboratory? And everything kinda sorta maybe ties back to Putin? Because then you’d be absolutely right.
This morning, the Court of Arbitration for Sport made a ruling on Russia’s cartoonish state-sponsored skullduggery, which has been going on since 2010: It upheld the International Association of Athletic Federations’ ban on Russian track and field athletes in the Rio Olympics, whether there’s hard evidence they were juicing or not. The International Olympics Committee is still making up its mind about that ban, but it’s also still possible it will ban the country altogether—a decision that would affect not just the medal counts in Rio, but the state of international athletics.
Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, builds models that forecast medal counts based on past performance, population, GDP, and other variables. In London, the Russians won four to 16 more medals than his models predicted—meaning their wins were probably inflated by doping. And his numbers have been borne out: The Olympic committee has since reallocated 11 Russian medals from the London games.
If the Russians competed in Rio cleanly (or, as Noland says, “no dirtier than average”), his models suggest they’re good for 66 or 67 medals. So how many more would he expect if doping went on unchecked? If they managed to nab 11 extra medals in London, when their doping program was still relatively new, you can bet they could get at least that number and then some. Noland figures the Russians would have come away with about 80 medals.
If the IOC does ban Russia, that’s enough medals to throw any Olympic predictions seriously out of whack. And many of the medals that might have otherwise gone to Russian athletes would likely go to competitors from the US, as they did at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics that the Soviet Union boycotted: In the absence of the USSR, the US’s total medal count skyrocketed to 174, and fell to 94 when the Soviets returned to the Olympics in 1988. “For the Olympic movement, it’s a huge deal,” says David Wallechinsky, the President of the International Society of Olympic Historians. “This isn’t Tonga or Paraguay, it’s one of three big medal winners.”
For the average American Olympics viewer, the absence of Russian athletes might go unnoticed. Where it most certainly will be noticed, of course, is Russia. “You cannot separate the Olympics from politics,” says Wallechinsky. “That’s a myth. Russia is already saying this a Western plot.” Countries have been banned from the Olympics before, but it’s always been for overtly political reasons. Germany and Japan were not on the Olympic guest list for the 1948 Summer Olympics, South Africa was banned during the apartheid era, and Afghanistan was banned in 2000.
The potential Russian ban wouldn’t be that much of a departure from those decisions, because Olympic athletes’ doping is inherently political. “If doping is done for the glory of the nation state, even if the athlete is doing it in secret with just an Internet connection and a PO box, it can take on an element of politics,” says John Gleaves, co-director of the International Network of Humanistic Doping Research. And state-sponsored doping is the same, but, you know, more so.
One of the reasons that doping has remained such a problem at the Olympics is that the whole process is completely byzantine, and countries are left to police themselves. “The anti-doping setup had led to a really lumpy enforcement,” says Gleaves. “How much anti-doping work can Kenya be expected to do when you look at its ranking in GDP?” The Russian doping scandal puts a spotlight on a problem that was already systemic in international sports.
Which may very well drive the IOC to be a stickler for the sake of its integrity and credibility. “The IOC is trying to hitch its wagon to environmental sustainability, wider participation in sport, sensible urban planning, and clean sport—and failed on all those accounts,” says David Goldblatt, author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. He puts on his best John Goodman: “‘I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude.’”
And this scandal seems an appropriate place for the IOC to draw that line. Look at what happened to East German athletes in the 1970s. “At the nadir, doping accounted for 17 percent of the medals won in women’s competitions,” says Noland. “There was no informed consent. You now have high rates of birth defects amongst East German athletes. The stuff they gave them had incredible, multi-generational physiological damage. I regard this as really evil.” Whether you think that doping is inherently bad or the future of athletic excellence, state-sponsored doping is not in the spirit of the games.
