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Years Later, Bittersweet Victory for Alysia Montaño
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREYNOV. 9, 2015
Alysia Montaño was fifth in
the women’s 800 at the 2012 Olympics. A World Anti-Doping Agency report has
detailed doping in Russian track and field. Credit Josh Haner/The New York
Times
Alysia Montaño, an American
800-meter runner, woke up early in Valencia, Calif. Knowing the World
Anti-Doping Agency was releasing the findings of its extraordinary inquiry into
doping and corruption in Russian track and field, she devoured the details of
the report in bed as soon as she awoke.
And then she began to cry.
“My hands were shaking,”
she said by telephone on Monday. “Anger, sadness, relief, all of it. I just got
a rush of emotions. I can’t even pinpoint all of them. At first you think of
all the moments you lost, and then you feel, ‘Oh my gosh, well, thank you.’
Then you are mad. I was sweating. I just broke out in a sweat, thinking, Is
this real? Are they actually going to do something?”
The answer at this deeply
demoralizing point for track and field appears to be yes, and it must be yes
after all the institutional rot that Dick Pound’s committee confirmed and
exposed in its 323-page report. Cover-ups of positive tests. Extortion. More
than 1,400 destroyed samples. It is no wonder Pound’s independent committee has
recommended Russia be suspended from track and field competition, including
next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, until it proves it can play and test
fair.
Mariya Savinova winning the
women’s 800 at the London Games. Alysia Montaño is at far left. Credit Josh
Haner/The New York Times
But for Pound to say he was
surprised was quite an admission, considering that he was part of the Canadian
delegation when the 100-meter champion Ben Johnson tested positive at the 1988
Olympics and later led the International Olympic Committee investigation into the Salt Lake City corruption scandal.
Montaño, still competing at
age 29 after giving birth to a daughter last year, agrees with the push to ban
Russia. She also believes she deserves some medals after finishing fourth in
the 800 meters at the 2011 world championships, fifth in the 2012 London
Olympics and fourth again at the 2013 world championships. In all those cases,
she finished behind Russians who now face lifetime bans from the sport.
“Absolutely I deserve that
bronze medal,” Montaño said of her Olympic race. “Even if I don’t get my podium
moment, it’s still a symbol of my work and also this time in history.”
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Montaño said she was
convinced her Russian rivals were doping in London, and the WADA report
concluded as much. It called Russia’s inaction on expeditiously dealing with
flags in the biological passports of Mariya Savinova, who won the gold, and
Ekaterina Poistogova, who took the bronze, “unexplained and highly suspicious.”
“When you go back and watch
the race,” Montaño said, “and you see someone literally watching the race
behind you, kind of jogging, and you are putting out max effort, and they kind
of just walk past you, put their hands in the air and are like ‘Yay!’ and you
are on the ground, huffing and puffing and about to throw up, you are like,
‘Are you kidding me?’ But you can’t speak up until you have evidence. You just
come off as a sour apple.”
But missing the podium in
London cost her more than sleep. It cost her money. “Maybe half a million
dollars, if you look at rollovers and bonuses, and that’s without outside
sponsorship maybe coming in,” she said. “That’s not why you’re doing it, but
you still deserve it.”
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There have been too many
dark times in her sport’s history, too many high-profile busts that should have
solved the major doping problem for good but turned into false dawns: Johnson
in 1988, or the American sprinter Marion Jones and the Bay Area Laboratory
Co-operative in the 2000s.
You can say this for track
and field: It takes down its biggest stars. The trouble is that outside
prodding and enterprise are too often required. “Obviously, it’s sad that it
took a big investigative report for them to do something,” Montaño said,
praising — as Pound had — a groundbreaking German television documentary by ARD
that brought the Russian doping to light last year.
But what makes this round
of scandal more egregious is the degree of cynicism and venality. If it is
proved that Lamine Diack, who served for 16 years as president of track and
field’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations,
did indeed demand bribes totaling more than one million euros in order to
suppress positive doping tests, then the corruption went straight from the top
to the track. And what would make it all the more unforgivable is that Diack
spent much of his mandate defending his federation’s record on antidoping, most
recently when he commandeered the microphone to make a rambling, closing remark
on the subject at his farewell news conference in Beijing in August.
The French authorities, who
have placed Diack under criminal investigation on suspicion of corruption and
money laundering, will have the final word on his involvement. But Montaño does
not sound nearly as surprised as one would expect her to be.
“I try not to think about
the most negative thing, but when I heard it, I thought that sounds about
right,” she said. “The I.A.A.F. is a corrupt organization. So this says
everything anyone has ever assumed, if you want to use the word assumed. But
it’s the truth. You can’t assume the truth.”
The question now — with the
latest hurricane over and the beach covered with broken trust and debris — is
how the I.A.A.F. and Russia will clean up. It seems imperative that WADA’s
leadership heed the Pound committee recommendation and declare Russia
noncompliant with the WADA code at its board meeting next week. It seems
imperative that the I.A.A.F. act with equal alacrity to ban Russia from track
and field competitions.
Sebastian Coe, who
succeeded Diack as I.A.A.F. president in August, already is facing calls to
step down. Coe was vice president of the I.A.A.F. for eight years before securing
the top spot, and he spent many an hour in Diack’s company without — so Coe
insists — the slightest inkling of Diack’s suspected criminal behavior.
“I will do whatever it will
take to fix this,” Coe told Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday. “I have the full support
of the sport, and I will do this.”
It is tempting, very
tempting, to conclude once and for all that international sports federations
have no business testing and sanctioning their own athletes, their own meal
tickets. Even in a best case, the appearance of conflict still exists.
Giving a more neutral
organization like WADA full responsibility for testing international-level
athletes is one solution. The shift could be financed by pooling existing
antidoping resources and by increasing the money supplied by the I.O.C. and
national governments. But that tack, too, carries a risk. Who then monitors
WADA?
“I think we need to look at
an outside doping agency, people that aren’t related to the sport,” Montaño
said. “We need someone who is a biochemist and all they are into is the lab
report.”
Whatever the changes, they
will come too late for Montaño to get her rightful Olympic moment or reward.
She still has lofty goals, however.
“I’d really like to race,”
she said, “in the women’s human 800-meter clean athletes final.”
A version of this article
appears in print on November 10, 2015, on page B10 of the New York edition with
the headline: Years Later, Bittersweet
Drugs Pervade Sport in Russia, World Anti-Doping Agency Report Finds
Dick Pound arrived to speak at a
news conference in Geneva on Monday. Credit Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone, via Associated Press
GENEVA — Members of Russia’s secret service intimidated workers at a
drug-testing lab to cover up top athletes’ positive results. They impersonated
lab engineers during the Winter Olympics in Sochi last year. A lab once
destroyed more than 1,400 samples.
Athletes adopted false identities to avoid
unexpected testing. Some paid to make doping violations disappear. Others
bribed the antidoping authorities to ensure favorable results, and top sports
officials routinely submitted bogus urine samples for athletes who were doping.
Those allegations were among hundreds contained
in a report released Monday by the World Anti-Doping
Agency. Across 323 pages, it implicates athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors
and various Russian institutions, laying out what is very likely the most
extensive state-sponsored doping program since the notorious East German regime
of the 1970s.
In addition to providing a granular look at
systematic doping, the group that drafted the report made extraordinary
recommendations, including a proposal that Russia be suspended from competition
by track and field’s governing body and barred from track and field events at
next summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
“It’s worse than we thought,” Dick Pound,
founding president of the World Anti-Doping Association and an author of the
report, said at a news conference in a Geneva hotel. “This is an old attitude
from the Cold War days.”
Russian officials responded with defiance,
disputing the investigation’s findings. “Whatever we do, everything is bad,”
Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s sports minister, told the news agency Interfax. “If this
whole system needs to shut down, we will shut it down gladly. We will stop
paying fees, stop funding the Russian antidoping agency, the Moscow antidoping
laboratory. We will only save money.”
Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the
Moscow lab whom Monday’s report accused of having solicited and accepted
bribes, dismissed the suggestions. “This is an independent commission which
only issues recommendations,” he said. “There are three fools sitting there who
don’t understand the laboratory.”
Mr. Pound said he had presented the group’s
findings to Mr. Mutko before they were released publicly. “He’s frustrated to
some degree,” he said. “He certainly knew what was going on. They all knew.”
The report also recommended that the World
Anti-Doping Agency impose lifetime bans on five Russian coaches and five
athletes, including the gold and bronze medalists in the women’s 800 meters at
the 2012 London Olympics.
“The Olympic Games in London were, in a sense,
sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing,” the
report read.
Bans from competition are not all that could
come of the inquiry. Mr. Pound said the agency had negotiated a cooperation
agreement with Interpol and had handed over extensive documents and evidence.
Interpol confirmed that cooperation with its own announcement on Monday, noting that related
inquiries stretched from Singapore to France.
Russia Is the Violations Leader
In June 2015, the World Anti-Doping Agency
released its first set of statistics on doping violations. The violations,
taken from 2013 data, included 115 countries and 89 sports. Russia had the
highest number of violations -- 225 across 30 sports -- with 42 of them coming
from track and field events.
Last week, the French authorities announced that they had opened a criminal
investigation into the former president of track and field’s world governing
body, Lamine Diack of Senegal, over allegations that he accepted bribes to
allow at least six Russian athletes to participate in competitions, including
the 2012 Olympics.
The former director of the medical and
antidoping division of that governing body, the International Association of
Athletics Federations, is also under investigation, the French authorities
said, along with Mr. Diack’s legal adviser.
Russian athletes, in soaring numbers, have been
caught doping in recent years. Russia had far more drug violations than any
other country in 2013 — 225, or 12 percent of all violations globally,
according to data from the World Anti-Doping Agency. About a
fifth of Russia’s infractions involved track and field athletes, the focus of
Monday’s report.
“This level of corruption attacks sport at its
core,” Richard H. McLaren, a Canadian lawyer and an author of the report, said
in an interview Sunday. In contrast to corporate governance scandals like those
currently affecting world soccer, he said, drug use by athletes has distorted the
essence of professional games. “Bribes and payoffs don’t change actual sporting
events,” Mr. McLaren said. “But doping takes away fair competition.”
The report released Monday was the result of a
10-month investigation by an independent commission of WADA. Its inquiry stemmed from a
December 2014 documentary by the German public broadcaster ARD, which drew on
accounts from Russian athletes, coaches and antidoping officials, who said that
the Russian government had helped procure drugs for athletes and cover up
positive test results.
Further allegations emerged in August, when ARD
and The Sunday Times of London released another report more broadly covering
the leaked results of thousands of international athletes’ blood tests dating
to 2001, showing decorated athletes in good standing with suspicious drug
tests. Those allegations — which drew significant suspicion to Kenya — are also being investigated by the independent commission, but
the results were not included in Monday’s report, as the inquiry is not
complete, the agency said.
The three-person commission, led by Mr. Pound,
also included Mr. McLaren, who teaches law at the University of Western
Ontario, and Günter Younger, the head of cybercrime for the police in the
German state of Bavaria.
Commission Accuses Russia of Doping
Richard W. Pound, a co-author of a report from the World Anti-Doping
Agency accusing Russia of running a doping program, spoke on Monday in Geneva
on the findings.
WADA’s foundation and executive board will
decide whether to act on the commission’s recommendations; they are scheduled
to meet next week in Colorado Springs, an event that motivated the timing of
the release of the commission’s report, Mr. Pound said.
In a statement on Monday, the International
Olympic Committee called the report “deeply shocking” and said it trusted the
judgment of the I.A.A.F., which would decide whether to bar Russia from
competition.
Mr. Pound did not offer any time frame for the
recommended suspension. If Russia did not fight the prescriptions — to enact
rigorous and specific drug-testing controls — he said he thought it could be
possible for the country’s track and field athletes to compete in the Summer
Olympics.
“If they
do the surgery and do the therapy, I hope they can get there,” he said. “That
is your nuclear weapon. Either get this done or you are not going to Rio.”
The commission also recommended that the
Russian antidoping authority be declared non-code-compliant indefinitely; that
the director of the Moscow laboratory be removed from his job; and that the
lab, which was provisionally banned in 2013, lose its accreditation.
In the case of financial prizes awarded to
athletes with drug test results now thought to be tainted, “the money’s gone,”
Mr. Pound said, “and whoever ought to have won didn’t.”
The Russian Ministry of Sport did not
immediately respond to a request for comment. But the initial reaction in
Russia fell in line with the tradition since Soviet times, with many
attributing the revelations to a Western plot to undermine the country’s
accomplishments.
“It is all connected with the fact that Russian
athletes demonstrate such good results, some countries are not satisfied with
it,” said Igor Ananskikh, a member of the youth policy and sports committee of
the Russian Parliament.
Nikolai Valuev, a former Russian heavyweight
boxing champion now serving as a deputy in the Parliament, said on the
state-run Rossiya 24 television channel: “In recent times, I hear only about
investigations of Russian athletes. This has already become a system, too.
“First of all,” he said, “we must conduct a
broad investigation to find out whether the results of the investigation are
true.”
Days before Monday’s report was published,
however, Russia’s athletics federation suspended five athletes, including a noted
distance runner, Maria Konovalova.
“The Russians themselves have said there are
vestiges of the old Soviet system, old-guard coaches who haven’t changed and
can’t change,” Mr. McLaren said. “The minister of sport says their way of
operating is over. But read our report.”
Russia has had a particularly prominent place
in the international sports spotlight in recent years, hosting not only the
Winter Games in Sochi in 2014 but also the track and field world championships
in Moscow the year before.
The country is scheduled to host the next World
Cup, in 2018, although the Swiss authorities are investigating allegations that
Russia might have secured the tournament through under-the-table agreements.
The Moscow laboratory implicated in Monday’s report is set to oversee testing
for FIFA during the World Cup. The lab did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.
Mr. Pound declined to say whether he thought
Russia should be stripped of its status as host of that tournament. “I think
FIFA’s got to sort out its own difficulties — without our help,” he said.
Mr. Mutko, Russia’s sports minister, sits on
FIFA’s executive committee.
“The credibility of sport has taken some
serious body blows in the last month,” Mr. Pound said, referring to the FIFA corruption case and to Monday’s report, which
suggested that similar doping violations existed beyond track and field.
“Public opinion is going to move toward all sports being corrupt.”
Neil
MacFarquhar, Ivan Nechepurenko and Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting from
Moscow.
A version of this article appears in print on
November 10, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Drugs
Pervade Russian Sport, Report Alleges
