Russian President Vladimir Putin (centre) meets with sportsmen as he visits a sports centre in Sochi on November 11, 2015.Alexei Druzhinin/AFP / Getty Images
At the risk of sounding hopelessly naive in a cynical world, let's start with this uplifting proposition: The best moments in sport are breathtaking dramas that captivate the mind, elevate the spirit and extend the possibilities of what it means to be human.
Now back to cruel reality: Cheaters prosper fabulously in globalized sport. The riches and prestige available to medal-winners encourage corruption, to the point where it too easily becomes the norm – as we're discovering from investigations into the prevalence of state-sponsored doping in Russian track and field.
An independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency, led by the fearless Canadian lawyer Dick Pound, has shown how grassroots efforts to clean up track and field are doomed to failure as long as governments and international sports bodies show little interest in exposing institutional dishonesty.
Mr. Pound's report, following up on investigations by German broadcaster ARD, is an eye-opener in a world that generally prefers to look the other way when drugs and sport are involved.
"It's worse than we thought," said the man who has devoted much of his career to exposing the sordid side of sports that stake a claim to idealistic Olympian values. Russia isn't just turning a blind eye to the country's many dopers, he found. It's actively encouraging them.
The state does everything in its limitless power to help the cheaters elude detection and punishment through a sham bureaucracy where the officials whose job is to catch the crooks of sports are actively involved in protecting them from outgunned anti-doping pursuers.
The extent of the corruption is so vast that top-level athletes paid a share of their winnings to Russian track officials as bribes in order to turn positive drug tests into negatives. Coaches and sports bureaucrats worked closely with contacts in Russia's only WADA-accredited drug-testing lab to suppress positive results. The lab's director himself destroyed 1,417 test samples before they could be checked by a WADA audit team.
Russian security officials monitored the laboratory and took an unusually deep interest in doping issues – contributing to the widespread feeling of "direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state," according to the Pound report. Russian security agents also infiltrated the doping lab at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Athletes, meanwhile, who are officially obligated to inform drug-testing authorities of their whereabouts and make themselves instantly available for surprise testing, routinely provided false information on their locations and even trained abroad under false names to avoid being tracked down.
In the end, the report said, the 2012 London Olympics were sabotaged because of Russia's machinations and lax scrutiny by IAAF, the international track-and-field governing body – whose former president, Lamine Diack, is being investigated in France on allegations that he took $1.4-million to cover up positive doping tests by Russian athletes in 2011.
One of the great and abiding flaws of the anti-doping movement is its lack of independence. What impetus does track and field or any other sport have to investigate itself and discover a fatal systemic flaw? WADA is nominally independent, yet it is poorly funded by the International Olympic Committee and national governments – receiving just $35-million last year – and cedes direct oversight of drug-testing to national sports committees.
No matter what international standards WADA champions, local authorities have continued to value national glory, however achieved, over global fairness. When organizations that stand to lose the most from the exposure of cheats retain the ability to control or circumvent the testing process, they have little interest in weeding out the high-achieving guilty from the run-of-the-mill innocent.
Commercialized professional sports are hardly rigorous in their pursuit of suspected dopers, for much the same reason. But Olympic sports like track and field are particularly susceptible to the broader and more devastating effect of state corruption simply because the stakes are even higher when the bragging rights of athletic nationalism come into play. In a closed and autocratic political realm like Vladimir Putin's Russia, where sport is seen as a highly visible and easily achievable assertion of superiority, all the elements are in place for gaming the system.
Russian authorities, in a form of defence that is no defence at all, have pointed their fingers elsewhere: Everybody's doing it, they say.
That's an easy deflection, but it also has an element of truth that Mr. Pound acknowledged. Track-and-field powers like Kenya and Jamaica do an inadequate job of testing their athletes, and too easily fall back on tired excuses of poverty and lack of infrastructure – despite the big-money global network that supports their overachieving heroes. Looking beyond governments, it's not hard to see the big-budget sponsors of track athletes as complicit promoters of the system they profit from. The current IAAF president, former runner Sebastian Coe, inexplicably works as a brand ambassador for Nike as well as being a veteran executive in an organization rife with corruption at the highest level. Aren't there bound to be conflicts for a man now tasked with the job of fixing a broken sport?
Yet if Mr. Pound's report reinforces the cynicism that people feel about the win-at-all-costs behaviour of professional athletes, this would be both sad and wrong. There remain many athletes who are clean, not least in Canada, which went through a purging process in the wake of the Ben Johnson doping scandal and emerged as a model of stringent fairness.
Many Canadian athletes compete in the knowledge that they are at a disadvantage the moment they toe the line. They lose medals and sponsorships to tainted competitors who escape detection because the system allows them to cheat, and then reap the rewards. This must change, and Mr. Pound's powerful report is an encouraging start.