With their Track and Field team already barred from competing in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, the rest of the Russian team got some bad news Monday. The World Anti-Doping Agency, after reviewing all their findings on Russia’s doping scandal, has recommended the entire Russian team (basketball, swimming, et all) banned from the games.
BREAKING: World Anti-Doping Agency recommends banning Russia from Rio Olympics.
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 18, 2016
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) commission issued the recommendation after discovering that Russia’s doping program was state-sponsored and at least 15 medalist in the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2014 were using performance enhancing drugs. The results were published Richard McLaren, a Canadian law professor. He recommended the “toughest sanctions available” for Russia an it’s Olympic team.
The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has also requested that the entire Russian team be banned.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has stomped his feet, shook his fist and filled his diaper over the proposed ban, and the track and field ban already in place.
“Now we’re observing a dangerous relapse into interference of politics in sport,” Putin said in a statement. ” Yes, the form of that interference has changed but the essence is the same, to make sport an instrument of geopolitical pressure and the formation of a negative image of countries and peoples. The Olympic movement, which plays a colossal unifying role for humanity, could again wind up on the edge of schism.”
Re-upping: Meet Grigory Rodchenko, the Edward Snowden of sports doping https://t.co/kuVxsCgqul via @WSJ
— Nathan Hodge (@nohodge) July 19, 2016
Putin even went as far as blaming a conspiracy for the proposed Russian ban instead of, you know, his state-sanctioned and sponsored cheating.
“What is behind such haste?” Putin asked. “An attempt to create certain media coverage, to apply pressure? The impression is forming that the USADA experts at the very least had access to the unpublished report and maybe themselves determined its tone and contents. In that case a national structure of one government is again dictating its will to the whole international athletic community.”
Or, maybe you shouldn’t have ordered Ex-KGB spies to set up an intricate James Bond villain cheating scheme there, Pooty-Poot? How about that?
“The McLaren Report has concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, a mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government that goes right to the field of play,” Travis Tygard, the cheif of the USADA, said. “Most importantly our hearts go out to athletes from all over the world who were robbed of their Olympic drams. We must come together as an international community, comprised of those who truly believe in the spirit of Olympism, to ensure this unprecedented level of criminality never again threatens the sports we cherish.”
https://twitter.com/PlanetOlahraga/status/755458617046765568
Ben Sanford, a skeleton racer from New Zealand on the WADA athlete’s commission summed it up more succinctly.
“I think Russia should be totally banned from the Olympics and Paralympics,” Sanford told the New York Times. “The Russians have to look at themselves. They created this program. They have to live with the consequences.”
Cuba has Olympic problems of its own
It’s not a doping scandal run by the entire country, but all the Olympic plans of these old Soviet Bloc countries and allies seem to be taking a significant legal hit.
Cuba is facing its own problem with its men’s national volleyball team as six of its members were recently arrested in Finland and charged with aggravated rape. The team was apparently playing in the FIVB World Volleyball League Finals in Tampere, Finland when the alleged rape took place. All eight men, including the team’s captain, are currently being held in Finland. Originally eight members of the team were in custody, but Finnish police released two on July 5.
#Rio2016 Cuba's men's volleyball team to participate in the Olympics despite the whole rape thing. https://t.co/FH6I22sxJ5
— Heywoodu U. Cuddleme (@heywoodu) July 14, 2016
Cuba, as of last Wednesday, is still sending its volleyball team to the Olympics in Rio, in spite of six of its members being held for sexual assault in another country.
“After not qualifying in volleyball for 16 years, we had 18 athletes in our pre-selection and we are going there with 12 in the Olympic games,” Cuba National Sports Institute director Jose Antonio Miranda told Reuters.
The Cuban Volleyball Federation was a little more emphatic.
“Preliminary information suggests that (the six arrested players) are linked to actions completely unrelated to the discipline, sense of integrity and respect that govern our sport.”
In other words, they’re on their own.
