In order to keep their dirty athletes looking clean, Russian officials at the highest levels utilized a depressingly simple system.
In his damning report citing near-total corruption within the Russian sports apparatus released on Monday, independent Canadian investigator Richard McLaren called it the "disappearing positive mechanism."
Once any athlete tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Russia's World Anti-Doping Agency-approved Moscow lab, his or her result would be sent up the political chain to Yuri Nagornykh, the deputy Minister of Sport. Mr. Nagornykh decided if the result would be allowed to stand or simply registered as a negative.
Hundreds of cheating Russian competitors got personal passes from Mr. Nagornykh. Non-Russian athletes did not get the same advantage. As a rule, their positive tests stood.
Mr. McLaren could find only one instance in which Mr. Nagornykh did not make this decision. It involved an unnamed foreign soccer player on contract in the Russian Premier League.
That decision – a pass – was made by the most powerful man in Russian (and, it could credibly be claimed, world) sport – Vitaly Mutko.
During his hour-long presentation in Toronto on Monday, Mr. McLaren stuck to what is known, rather than what could be inferred. He refused repeated requests to make a personal judgment about the results of his investigation. The one moment in which that lawyerly façade fell involved Mr. Mutko.
Pressed by a Russian reporter as to why he hadn't interviewed any Russian officials in Russia, Mr. McLaren referred back to an earlier doping investigation during which Mr. Mutko had agreed to talk.
"We found that information and that process singularly unhelpful," Mr. McLaren said dryly. Several people laughed.
Mr. Mutko is Russia's Minister of Sport, Tourism and Youth Policy. A former chairman of the Zenit St. Petersburg soccer club, he was tapped by Russian President Vladimir Putin to oversee the national sports set-up in 2008. He was the prime mover at the Sochi Olympics. He ran the bid that won Russia the 2018 World Cup. He was the man on the field seen egging on Russian hooligans as they invaded an English supporters' section during Euro 2016. He was the Richelieu behind the state-sponsored drug scheme – remote, but in charge.
"[I]t is inconceivable that Minister Mutko was not aware of the doping cover-up scheme," Sochi lab director and key whistle-blower Grigory Rodchenkov told Mr. McLaren's investigation. This caution in accusing Mr. Mutko comes despite the fact that Mr. Rodchenko met frequently with him. Evidently, the minister – a lawyer by training – was careful with his words.
So it is curious and telling that the one instance in which Mr. Mutko chose to fully reveal himself was for a soccer player, and one not even Russian.
It speaks to the meaning of the world's most popular sport in the Russian mindset, and gives a clue as to what the most fitting punishment should be in the wake of the McLaren Report.
Whether the IOC will suspend the entire Russian team from the Rio Olympics, as has been widely suggested, is yet to be determined. But regardless of that decision, a further step ought to be taken – removing the 2018 World Cup from Russia.
It is close to certain that a blanket Olympic ban on Russia will punish some innocents. Surely the whole team – something around 500 competitors before the decision was taken to exclude track athletes – isn't on drugs. We can argue about the fairness of such a move, but that must start with a reasonable guess that people who've done nothing wrong will be penalized along with the cheaters.
You may not think it matters. But if you'd spent the past 20 years of your life working toward a single goal, only to have it snatched away at the last minute by the actions of a cabal of corrupt bureaucrats, you would. It's a moral quandary.
You cannot make that same argument about the World Cup. Its only function is to bolster the reputations of those same bureaucrats and their patrons. And in keeping with their modus operandi, the procurement of the World Cup was every bit as crooked.
We know to a significant probability that Russia purchased the World Cup by bribing FIFA officials.
We know it only to a probability because when FIFA did its own (shoddy) inquiry into the issue, it was stonewalled at every turn. Investigators asked Russia to provide all the computers related to the bid. They were told they'd been destroyed. Not sold, or repurposed, or wiped clean. Destroyed.
All the relevant e-mails had disappeared because, according to Russian bid officials, they did all their business on Gmail. Russia asked Google to retrieve them, but Google didn't call them back. That was the actual excuse.
When Japanese officials told FIFA they'd colluded with Russia on a vote-sharing scheme, FIFA's then in-house counsel Hans-Joachim Eckert dismissed the claims.
His reasoning: "No supporting evidence has been found."
Apparently, co-conspirator testimony is good enough for any court in the world, but not for FIFA. Nothing came of that report. It was released only in a bowdlerized form and the investigator in charge, Michael Garcia, washed his hands of it.
All of this took place before the U.S. Department of Justice reached out its long arm and knocked disgraced former FIFA supremo Sepp Blatter from his perch atop world soccer. Things might be very different now.
Thus, the McLaren Report is the excuse needed to enact a punishment that ought to have been levied two years ago.
The IOC has no power over FIFA, but the two are twinned in one thing – no one believes either organization is on the up-and-up. Both are running jokes, a sort of interchangeable shorthand for institutionalized, aristocratic avarice.
Here's the chance for them to link arms and take a very large step back into public esteem.
We now know that Russia has been cheating for years on an industrial scale in every conceivable sort of sport. Making the Russians pay for that is a tricky business involving hundreds of people of varying levels of culpability.
But the World Cup is easy. That is a brand extension of the Putin government. It's a way to project Russian power onto the world. It has no other purpose.
They've already sullied the Olympics in their own backyard. Rather than ask why Russia should lose the world's other showcase sports event, we'd be better off wondering if there's a single person left who believes they still deserve it.
Cathal Kelly