Dick Pound, who heads the commission into corruption and doping in athletics, gestures at a news conference Germany earlier this year.Michael Dalder/Reuters
What can be done to clean up the Olympics?
With Rio 2016 less than two months away, there's a natural desire to believe the extraordinary performances we're about to witness are real. No one wants to be duped by dishonest athletes. Clean competitors should have complete confidence that their events aren't rigged in favour of drug-enhanced cheats with tight connections at the highest levels of sport.
But there's every reason to be skeptical. Recent retesting of samples from the Beijing and London Olympics has resulted in 55 positive tests for the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Many of these compromised athletes were from Russia, which fits a broader pattern of corruption that has emerged as investigators probe worrying allegations made by Russian whistle-blowers.
A report by a panel of the World Anti-Doping Agency, chaired by Canadian lawyer Dick Pound, found that the London Olympics were "sabotaged" by the participation of Russian athletes who shouldn't have been allowed to compete because of evidence they were cheating. The Russian anti-doping agency and its Moscow testing lab, along with the IAAF, track's international governing body, were implicated in the cover-up. Investigators in France allege a former IAAF president received huge payments to bury the Russians' positive tests.
Mr. Pound accused Russia of "state-sponsored doping" and said that Russian athletics suffered from "a deeply rooted culture of cheating." After years of indifference, the IAAF finally took action and suspended Russian track and field athletes from international competition in November.
That was just the beginning. On Friday, the IAAF will decide whether Russia's track-and-field team should now be banned from competing at Rio. Besides the evidence supplied by Mr. Pound, the IAAF will draw on an investigation by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren into allegations made by the former director of Russia's anti-doping lab that he led a state-sanctioned doping operation designed to win Olympic glory by the back door.
It is a day of reckoning many thought would never come, simply because, at the top levels of sport, bad actions rarely have meaningful consequences – a few rogue athletes or coaches get ostracized, and that's that. But the mounting evidence of systemic cheating in Russia can no longer be ignored. A country that cheats as a nation must be punished as a nation. And if not now, when?