Drugs-watch: preparing ourselves to watch another world sporting spectacle
Continuing this organ’s focus upon the problems of drug-use in sport, here are a couple of subjects to remind readers of today:
OLYMPIC GAMES AND RUSSIAN DOPING
The Opening Ceremony for this year’s 23rd Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, is scheduled to take place on Friday 9th February – even though the competition events actually begin the day before.
Here’s the latest from the You Couldn’t Make It Up factory that is the International Olympic Committee:-
Last month the IOC banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics because of the well-documented and widely condemned state-sponsored doping programme that it operated when hosting the 2014 Games in Sochi at which it had 232 athletes competing.
Earlier this week the IOC then announced that it was inviting 169 Russian athletes to compete as ‘Olympic Athletes From Russia’ (or ‘AOR’) at the 2018 Winter Olympics … er … provided they could prove they were clean.
Apparently the IOC has estimated that between 70% and 80% of these did not compete at Sochi – so presumably (the logical extension of this assertion is that) between 20% and 30% of them did … but that’s all right, then?
Let’s just remind ourselves that the IOC has been re-testing all samples provided by Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games and at the end of December 2017 banned another 11 of them – these were:
Tatiana Ivanova and Albert Demchenko; speed skaters Ivan Skobrev and Artem Kuznetcov; cross-country skiers Nikita Kryukov, Alexander Bessmertnykh, and Natalia Matveeva; bobsledders Liudmila Udobkina and Maxim Belugin; and ice hockey players Tatiana Burina and Anna Shchukina.
So that makes a total of 43 Russian athletes who competed in Sochi that so far have been banned for life.
[I should add that for completeness and fairness that all of them are appealing against the Court of Arbitration for Sport].
This can be added to the fact that last week the International Paralypmic Committee also banned Russian from sending a team to the 2018 Winter Paralympics, albeit that approximately 35 are going to be allowed to compete as AORs – or at least the Paralypmic equivalent of AORs.
DOPING IN THE SPORT OF SWIMMING
Whilst we are getting ready to behold the 2018 Winter Olympics, it also goes without saying – but it is also worth reminding ourselves – that no major world sport is immune to the problems of both recreational and performance-enhancing drug-taking.
Here’s a link to a thought-provoking interview with British former Olympic swimmer Michael Jamieson conducted by Donald McRae that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
