It turns out, the 2014 Sochi Olympics offered a preview of the 2016 US elections.
Let me explain.
This week, the World Anti-Doping Agency voted to unanimously to ban Russia from four years of international competition for a state-sponsored scheme to tip the level playing field.
As the nation hosted the Olympic games in Sochi, it was running a program to give its athletes a chemical advantage, and hide the evidence by replacing, each night while competitors slept, urine samples that contained evidence of cheating with clean samples collected months earlier.
Certainly individual athletes cheat, but when the state sponsors the effort it rises to a different level.
The ruse worked. Russia topped the medal count, until a whistle blower divulged the plot and sparked an investigation.
Russia as a team was banned from competing in Pyeongchang in 2018, but Russian athletes could still compete as individuals. That compromise has not solved the problem, and WADA has detected further subterfuge and possible actions to cloak continued efforts to cheat the system.
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The United States’ intelligence agencies have found that Russia acted to tip the playing field of the American election in 2016 as well. Many in the intelligence community assert that these efforts are ongoing.
And as surely as 2018 in Pyeongchang followed 2014 in Sochi, the American election of 2020 is slated to follow 2016.
Really, why would a nation that opts to undermine the founding premise of sports – that all competitors are subject to the same conditions of competition – respect the concept of fair play in other areas?
At this point, it’s appropriate to ask, should a nation that acts to subvert fair play in one arena be expected to follow the rules in another?
You could discount what happens in sports as an irrelevant game. People do that all the time. When I became a sports writer in the 1990s, there were still those who dismissed the genre as the toy department. But these trivial games are actually quite serious.
The reason that we compete in sports on an international level, is that we find merit in those tests of strength and cooperation. We think that the process of following rules and learning how to work with those around us teaches us something about character, about what it means to be a trustworthy and disciplined person.
Think about it, in sports we ask everyone – no matter your gender, race, religion or lack thereof – to follow the same rules of engagement. If nations can agree to those parameters, then even countries with long-standing enmity can interact. Later, in other arenas they can agree to ground rules and set parameters for more substantive engagement.
Diplomacy and sports really aren’t so different after all.
It actually says quite a bit when the reward for success, in the case of the Olympics a medal, becomes a substitute for the athletic greatness it took to get there. Ask most athletes and they will tell you they want to play and beat the best because it is the process of excellence that is as much as part of the goal as the moment on the podium.
Instead, Russian chemists played Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line of a candy factory, frantically swapping clean urine samples for doping athletes.
It says a lot about character and win-at-all-costs culture. And WADA has found that the Russians have not stopped trying to give their athletes an unfair advantage through science and subterfuge.
And why wouldn’t they? The scheme would have worked, if not for one whistleblower.
Jane McManus is director of the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College.
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