During the first day of women's curling at the Sochi Olympics, the Russian crowd on hand (and they were all Russians) couldn't quite figure out what was going on.
They hooted everything their own team did. They booed the opposition. They screamed incoherently throughout, mostly at each other. By the civil standards of curling audiences, this was the equivalent of throwing bags of nails at the competitors.
"Some of the cheers were" … [meaningful pause] … "interesting," eventual Canadian gold medalist Jill Officer said.
When their own team finished, and despite the fact that the event was still going on, the Russian fans got up and left. They did that over and over again, in every sport venue. No Russian participants equalled no crowd.
The Olympics are about the simple beauty of the world's most promising young people meeting in friendly competition, and the hope that they might teach the rest of us how to bridge our cultural divides. It must be true because Panasonic and Coca-Cola keep telling us it is. Russia didn't get the corporate memo.
Instead of trying to beat them flat with our ineffectual sermonizing, we ought to be thanking them.
Now we know the Russians cheated their way through those home Games, and the ones before, in spectacularly brazen fashion. It couldn't be much worse if they'd had guys disguised as man-sized pylons tripping runners as they went by.
As usual, we pretend shock. High-performance athletes and doping?! A government that occasionally invades and kills its neighbours determined to win despite the rules?! Are there others hidden among us acting self-interestedly (possibly while high), and how do we convince them to stop since it's wrong?
The world is now invoking its Pavlovian Morality Response: See wrong, light the fires of change for three news cycles, wait for them to gutter and then pivot to the next outrage.
Rising onto tippytoes on the soapbox he's lacked lo these many years, Dick Pound has called for Russian athletes to be banned en masse from the Rio Games next summer. It makes a good headline and no sense. Thanks to that state-sponsored conspiracy Pound helped publicize, there is no hard evidence left on which to base such an unprecedented penalty. That was sort of the point.
There's also a larger one – that the International Olympic Committee welcomes people walking under all sorts of bloody banners into its midst on the reasonable grounds that no single athlete shoulders the sins of a country.
A homicidal cult like North Korea gets to push a team into the ring at gunpoint, but Russian pole vaulters are out because spooks were doing the old switcheroo with urine samples? I think not. If you feel otherwise, I look forward to attending your rebranded "Olympics for Good Guys (as Defined by Us Good Guys)."
Russia will be in Rio. No amount of western garment-rending will change that.
On a rules-and-regs basis, the upshot of the Russian doping scandal is that there is no upshot. As long as the will to win outstrips the ability of officials to limit it, cheating will seep into every available crack in the structure. There are plenty of cracks and even more unscrupulous sorts willing to sneak through them.
You could plausibly argue that the Russian revelations will increase the number of Olympic drug-users, because those who run clean now know they're not up against some bush-league locker-room operation. They're corner stores fighting PED Wal-Marts.
The Olympics can't be completely honest until they are functionally meaningless. As long as there's something to be gained, people will try to steal it. This is neither good nor bad. It's only proof the thing has value.
What has actually happened here is salutary in a malign way. Russia has reintroduced animus into the relentlessly positive Gumdrop Palace the Olympics have become over the past quarter-century. After too much time spent holding hands across the globe in an often transparently phony way (let's never forget ex-Canadian Olympic Committee boss Marcel Aubut welcoming Vladimir Putin into Canada House like a Slavic Nelson Mandela), we finally have the villain to complement a surfeit of heroes.
The best stories at any Olympics are the good ones, especially the small moments of selflessness. My favourite from Sochi was Canadian coach Justin Wadsworth dashing out onto a cross-country track to replace the damaged ski of a Russian running dead last. From a competition standpoint, it meant nothing. From the perspective of reinforcing our bedrock self-concept – that of Canadian decency – it meant everything.
Taken in isolation, the winning often has little real taste. Who knows anything about the obscure disciplines Canada often dominates before we win, and who cares a week later? Perishingly few.
In order to fully appreciate the winner, there needs to be something more at stake than medal colours. All good fights have a grudge at their core. Russia just gave that feeling back to us.
How we've missed them as cartoonishly ambitious bad guys in the sports realm (if not in any other place). Nobody pulls a fix with quite as much cheek. In this relatively consequence-free environment, it's almost admirable. It helps us remember that the world is not a fair place regardless of how many times we repin the rule sheet to the global noticeboard.
During the 1980 Moscow Games, Soviet officials conspired to create helpful drafts during their competitors' portion of the javelin competition; they undid a losing performance in the diving event because of crowd (meaning the supportive, local crowd) interference; they jobbed revolutionary comrade Nadia Comaneci out of a gold medal so that a Russian could win. Home fans weren't satisfied with just cheering their countrymen and women. They relentlessly jeered everyone else. That was the sort of Olympics to make you experience a true gamut of emotions.
Moscow was also unusual in that no one tested positive for drugs. Apparently, some things never change. We forgot that. This week, we got our reminder.
One of Lenin's favourite proverbs, applied to all spheres of Russian life, was "Doveryai, no proveryai" – "Trust, but verify." By that he meant "Don't trust, ever."
In real life, it's chilling. In the excessively marketed playground of the Olympics, it's a reason to care even more.
Cathal Kelly