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“It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy.
It wasn’t a French salon.”
― Martin Cruz Smith
Shades of Russian politics and doping and politics.
According to Mikhail Degtyarev, the Russian Olympic Committee’s sport minister and president, who spoke with TASS News Agency on Thursday, the Russian Olympic team is preparing to compete in the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The overarching question to Russia is, “Have you ceased all forms of government support for systematic doping, and can you prove it?”
“We are preparing for full-fledged participation in the 2028 Olympic Games,” said Degtyarev. He made the statement during the Sports Diplomacy: New Challenges and Opportunities session, which was part of the 2025 Eastern Economic Forum.
He continued, “We will hold the second Summer Spartakiad featuring our strongest athletes. There will be 9,000 of them there. This is a domestic competition that will single out the best of the best. In other words, we will start selecting candidates for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.”
Thomas Bach is misdirected
IOC President Thomas Bach defended the approach, stating, “Athletes cannot be held responsible for the acts of their government. If they support these actions, then they are falling under the sanction. If they don’t, then they must enjoy their rights, which is the principle which is guiding us.”
The question for Mr. Bach is, “Where do you draw the line?”
When a government requires its people to cheat by doping, the athletes cannot be permitted to participate in those events. This is so especially if it is not their choice; totalitarian regimes must not be endorsed.
Bach has a history of supporting Russia. Ironically, a Russian referred to the IOC as a neo-Nazi organization, given that Bach is German.
Meanwhile, the US is slowly moving towards totalitarianism, but with free democratic elections, Trump’s reign will end. No so in Russia.
Comically, the previous sports minister, Oleg Matytsin, announced that in 2024, Russia was not going to boycott the Paris Olympic Games. Of course, that was a moot point as the backward nation was banned due to Putin’s illegal attack on Ukraine.
In March 2024, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova referred to the IOC as racist and neo-Nazi.
The IOC announced that Russian and Belarusian athletes would not be permitted to parade during the opening ceremony. The Russian and Belarusian athletes were to compete under a neutral flag. Also, no Russian anthem will be played, and athletes will wear a neutral uniform.
Zakharova said, “The IOC’s decisions are illegal, unfair, and unacceptable. We are appalled by the unprecedented discriminatory conditions imposed by the IOC on Russian athletes. These statements show how far the IOC has strayed from its stated principles and has turned to racism and neo-Nazism.”
The 2028 Summer Olympics are scheduled to take place in Los Angeles from July 14 to the 30th. For the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the IOC allowed 15 Russians and 11 Belarusians to compete under a neutral flag. No national symbols, anthems, or affiliations to be displayed.
Russia has a history
In 2021, the president of the Russian Athletics Federation (RusAF) was forced to resign three months into his new role. This was due to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) decision in the case against the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Russian Government officials were prohibited from serving on sports bodies until December 2022.
Peter Ivanov was elected as the RusAF president on Nov. 30, 2021. He was appointed deputy head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service in Russia, which presides over antitrust law.
In December, WADA told RusAF that the reinstatement process would begin as soon as March 2021.
Russia’s ban from international competition was cut in half from four years to two years. The CAS decided in Dec. after hearing the beleaguered nation’s appeal.
Also in December that year, RusAF narrowly avoided permanent banishment from sport. They had failed to pay several million dollars in fines. The fines were due for delaying a special WADA committee from getting access to the Moscow Laboratory mainframe computer. This was central to the systematic doping.
By mid-2020, apparently, 61 suspect doping samples had been documented by the investigative team. Allegedly, many more have been since.
By April 2020, WADA completed 298 Russian athlete tests.
By June 2020, there was the resignation of the then RusAF President Yevgeny Yurchenko after just six months on the job. The reason? RusAF failed to pay a $6-million fine (of $10-million USD) owed to World Athletics.
The fine was levied instead of being expelled altogether from World Athletics. Banned due to a long trail of corruption to do with alleged extortion, bribery, drug cover-up, and data manipulation.
“I hope that the newly elected head of the All-Russian Athletics Federation will be able to move forward in resolving almost five-year difficulties in relations with World Athletics, and will also ensure that sufficient funding is raised for the development of the Federation,” he said.
The year prior, Russian athletes who were likely to compete internationally under a neutral flag had written an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin. They asked him to intervene in the issue. To no avail.
Later in the year, world champion high jumper Danil Lysenko was up against the possibility of receiving an eight-year ban. This came after Russian officials apparently obstructed an investigation into the world indoor high jump champion.
Russian Anti-Doping Agency’s Yury Ganus told TASS that “all steps taken by the previous executive management at the RusAF led to the fact that he would continue performing as an athlete only after an eight-year period.”
In early June 2020, Alexander Shustov received a four-year ban from the Athletics Integrity Unit, which was held up by CAS after testing positive for a banned substance.
There have been a few more suspensions since.
And then there are the storytellers
Internal bloodletting continued, where chaos and infighting were killing any remaining civility.
Grigory Rodchenkov published his tell-all book, The Rodchenkov Affair: How I brought Down Putin’s Secret Doping Engine.
He didn’t pull any punches.
At the same time, Russian whistleblower Vitaly Stepanov and his athlete wife Yulia Rusanova were the subject of another tell-all biographical account of life in Russian sport.
The Russian Affair, according to author David Walsh, is a love story. It is, however, the love story is set to the backdrop of the world’s greatest ever scandal in sport. About uninhibited doping and corruption that rots Russian sport to the core.
Icarus, is a documentary by amateur American cyclist, Bryan Fogel, from the first-person perspective, with his plan to dope and beat the system. The film documents just how easy it is for professional athletes to get away with it. But the “stuff” gets real part way through and the documentary takes a sharp left turn into indomitable chaos.
It was about a third of the way in that Rodchenkov got caught in the Great Russian doping scandal. The most scandalous of modern sporting history. It was bigger than Ma Junren of China, bigger than East Germany and bigger than BALCO.
Much of this started with German broadcaster ARD/TV by way of investigative journalist Hajo Seppelt. Seppelt cracked the lid on Russian and Kenyan doping.
At the time, it was written that “if WADA, CAS, World Athletics, and the IOC think Russian doping is anywhere near over, they have their heads buried deep in a Moscow snowdrift.”
So, Russia, have you ceased the systematic doping, and can you prove it?
