Why Russia Makes the Olympics Better – Wall Street Journal

Amid all the drama about how to punish the Russians for doping, here’s an uncomfortable truth—the Olympics are a far less entertaining event without them in Rio.

We can all agree that it’s better to have a competition in which all the athletes are clean. As this week’s investigative report from the World Anti-Doping Agency showed, the Sochi Games certainly were not. Russian officials managed to swap out dirty urine samples for clean ones, right past the international inspectors who were supposed to be on the lookout for just this. So it’s impossible not to feel awful for those who finished behind those Russian athletes in Sochi who have since been implicated in a cheating scheme that would make John le Carre proud. It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for any athlete whose skin crawls at the idea of getting into a starting block next to a Russian these days.

I’m not saying it would be fair to let the Russians compete—that’s not my call. I’m saying the Olympics stand to lose plenty without them.

The Olympic Games have never been better than when they featured two superpowers facing off.

A child of the Cold War, I got hooked on the Games in the 1970s and 1980s, when the showdowns between East and West really felt like a civilized form of warfare, a battle between oppression and freedom.

The Soviets and the East Germans were the villains of the Games back then. We were convinced they were all cheating. And their athletes often looked suspiciously like professionals at a time when the Olympics was supposed to be an amateur event.

Even the officiating seemed to be influenced by geopolitics. The dreaded Soviet judges always seemed to give the lowest scores to Western gymnasts and figure skaters.

At times, the chicanery seemed blatant, such as the 1972 men’s basketball final, when the referees somehow gave the Soviets three chances to bring the ball the length of the court with a single second on the clock to steal the gold medal. The tape of Sergey Belov gathering Ivan Edeshko’s full-court pass and dropping in the winning lay-up was one of the most haunting replays of my childhood.

But all the injustices—and the challenge of righting them—only made the stakes feel that much bigger. It wasn’t just the West vs. the East or Democracy vs. Communism. It was Good vs. Evil—and it was awesome.

Sports need rivalries. From an entertainment perspective, the fall of the Iron Curtain meant the Olympic Games suddenly became far less compelling. There was no one to root against. It was like watching a Bond film in which everyone was working for MI6.

So while I fully understand the push to give the Russian Olympic team the heave-ho, it’s also true that the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin has brought back some of that old Cold War flavor. Like his Soviet predecessors Putin has made the Olympics and international sports an essential part of reasserting Russian power the past decade.

And just think of what a blanket ban on the Russian team would do to the Rio Games. Yes, we all enjoy watching American athletes win medals. But without a Russian team, the Games threaten to turn into a two-week victory lap for Team USA. There will be almost no drama.

At the last Summer Olympics without the Russians, 1984 in Los Angeles, the U.S. won a ridiculous 174 medals. The next closest country was Romania, with 53. China will surely put up a better challenge than that, but besting the Chinese, who rack up medals in sports like table tennis and badminton, doesn’t have the same feel.

I don’t pretend to know the proper punishment for the Russians. The WADA report, issued by a Canadian lawyer, portrayed a covert doping operation that required the coordination of top sports officials and the modern version of the KGB to allow Russian athletes to hide their performance enhancing drugs for five years, even on the biggest stages.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that the entire infrastructure of Russia’s sports officialdom, including its coaches and trainers, and the athletes who knowingly participated in the deception should be banned from international sports forever.

But there’s another part of me that can’t help but see the current scandal in the context of the old Soviet-U.S. hatefest that once energized the Games. Putin has ratcheted up the rhetoric, portraying the latest WADA report as a Western attack on Russia.

Putin spent $50 billion on the Sochi Games, making it clear how important international sport is to him and how badly his Russia needs the Olympics to reassert itself in the 21st century. And yet, I can’t let go of the idea that Olympics need Russia badly, too.

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com