The great Rio sportsfest is over. The Paralympians have arrived home, and they are recovering from their jet lag. The Olympians are already on to the next thing. Memories are fading of the state-sponsored doping scandal that overshadowed the opening of the Games in August and led to around 100 Russian athletes being excluded from the Olympics, and all Russian athletes being banned from the Paralympics. So there is a window of opportunity, a moment to lay the foundations for a genuinely clean 2020 Tokyo Games. There is an obstacle, however. Officially it is denied. But the body that should be most interested in promoting such an outcome, the International Olympic Committee, appears instead to be trying to undermine Wada, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the organisation best placed to police international sport.
The IOC is considering setting up its own “integrity unit”, a new body that Wada officials fear would take over its powers to investigate allegations and sanction drug cheats, in retribution for Wada’s independence at Rio. The flaws in such an arrangement were plain for all to see in this summer’s row: Wada, acting on the findings of the McLaren report that it had commissioned into the extent of state support in Russia for cheating, demanded that all Russian athletes should be banned. The IOC, whose president, Thomas Bach, is close to Vladimir Putin, insisted that such a decision was for the IOC to make, and subsequently decided that the 28 international sports federations should be the arbiters of which athletes could compete. The one person banned by the IOC was the whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova, who had alerted Wada to the extent of Russian doping. It is hard to avoid concluding that the IOC has too much at stake in mounting a global spectacular to be a credible anti-doping body as well. If its main purpose is to run a global sports event, the suspicion will always be that policing the sports themselves is a subordinate concern.
Wada is not perfect. It is not entirely independent of the IOC: personnel overlap, and its president, Sir Craig Reedie, is also a vice president of the IOC. The IOC provides half of Wada’s funding, with national governments making up the rest. Currently the whole Wada budget comes to little more than £20m. That is not enough.
According to Sir Craig, Wada needs more powers and a governance review to ensure that it can tackle corruption effectively. But it also needs the budget to conduct in-depth investigations, to keep up with the constantly shifting world of athletics medicine, and to establish and maintain international standards against which the sports federations’ and national governments’ anti-doping policies can be judged.
Clean, honest sport is not only a concern for the guardians of the Olympic ideal at the IOC. It matters to the governments that pay so heavily to put on major sporting events such as the Olympics; it matters to the federations that run individual sports; and it matters to the sponsors and the broadcasters. Everyone who has an interest in it should contribute to the anti-doping agency’s budget. They will all gain – including the athletes themselves, for they are the first victims of the cheats. But the biggest beneficiaries will be the fans, who deserve to know that they can believe what they are seeing.
