This year, the World Anti-Doping Agency will receive about $30-million (U.S.) in funding.
Considering the organization's rationale – to police all the world's athletic cheaters all of the time, including those who shelter under the umbrella of the state – it doesn't sound like much. At the rate at which that mandate is bleeding backward in time, it's beginning to seem farcical.
We know Russia ran a PED chop shop – bad urine samples in one end, good urine samples out the other – at the Sochi Olympics. WADA was so turned about in that scam that it was functionally complicit. The dirty work happened overnight in a WADA lab.
Now here comes China with another whopper.
This week, a high-ranking whistleblower alleged in a German documentary that through the 1980s and 90s, China operated an equally ambitious drug scheme involving more than 10,000 athletes and "every" world championship competition. According to Dr. Xue Yinxian, competitors as young as 11 were receiving chemical boosts courtesy of the government.
It's a hell of a story that will surprise hermits and those who've been travelling in space for the past few decades. At China's 1997 national games, the country's women's weightlifting team – up until that point, an undistinguished group – set new world records in all nine weight classes.
There's brazen and then there is whatever that is. Anti-doping authorities have been playing this losing game of whack-a-mole with China for years. It continues unabated. In February, several athletes who worked under suspiciously successful Chinese track coach Ma Junren alleged that banned drugs had been a compulsory part of his training regimen – along with high-altitude running and the occasional beating.
Given the scale and consistency of these reports, the sensible response to "Here's another story about China playing silly buggers back in the day" is to shrug and, at best, commit to working harder to prevent such malfeasance going forward.
Instead, smarting from the accusation that they'd ignored Xue when she made the same claim five years ago, WADA has put its tired, ineffectual dogs on a decades-old scent.
The alleged athletic crimes happened years before WADA was created in 1999 and stand outside the statute of limitations for punishing such things. Nonetheless, WADA said it would "initiate an investigative process" into the situation.
Presumably, this crack team will be visiting whatever passes for a GoodLife in Shanghai, asking 50-somethings in CrossFit classes: "Have you ever won a gold medal at anything? If so, have you stored all your urine for the last 30 years under laboratory conditions? Because we'd really appreciate it if we could take a look."
What is the point of this exercise? What possible good can come of it? The only results I can envision are panting headlines for the five years leading into the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, and another reputational body blow to amateur sport. Whatever they turn up, there isn't the slightest possibility of a result that will satisfy anyone. It's institutional masochism.
If you're going to head down this path, it makes sense to invest some of that $30-million into building a time machine. Perhaps interdimensional WADA nerd squads can travel back to 1976 and nail the East Germans just as they're tossing suitcases full of used syringes into the St. Lawrence River. It would be just about as useful.
What no one can bring themselves to admit is that, like every other war on drugs, this one has failed. The Olympic movement is long past dreams of eradication. All they do now is occasionally announce that a crime has apparently occurred and that their under-resourced cops will chase robbers. Catch them? Eliminate them? Let's not get carried away.
The organized criminals may not always get away with it, but they will do so on aggregate. Just like in life.
Whenever WADA manages to stumble sideways into a win, they screw that up, too. After their humiliation at Sochi, they asked London, Ont.-based lawyer and professor Richard McLaren to clean up their mess. Working with a small team under immense international pressure and impossible deadlines, he gave WADA (and thus the IOC) the goods on Russia, proving insofar as it is possible that their doping program was state sponsored. Russia has since essentially admitted as much. The IOC didn't so much drop that ball as stab it repeatedly with a sharpened screwdriver.
What was McLaren's reward for his civic-minded volunteerism?
Last month, three unremarkable Russian cyclists named in his probe announced they were suing him for $7-million owing to "great reputational harm."
A tony local law firm called a press conference in Toronto to announce the suit, which was filed in Ontario Superior Court. A supplementary Russian legal team was brought in to be on hand. The gathering was put together by PR firm Navigator in a downtown hotel.
How a trio of Russian nobodies managed to fund such lavish foreign representation was not explained. Nor was anything else.
The statement of claim was not provided. The cyclists – piped in on Skype – robotically read prepared statements. Everyone involved refused to answer questions, including the simplest procedural ones. Not even one as basic as: "Have any of these three ever failed a drug test?"
It was a fairly obvious sort of theatre, pointless as well as absurd. WADA hid behind the "pending litigation" excuse and refused to comment, leaving McLaren dangling.
One can imagine how anxious people will be in the future to lend WADA an investigative hand when they come around asking. That may have been the whole point.
WADA still has a purpose – testing athletes for banned drugs. Every once in a while, they will catch the sort of people who have their dope shipped FedEx from an online pharmacy. The ones who are smart about it (i.e. the ones who win medals) will continue to skate, as they always have.
Anything beyond that effort – especially the organization's Sisyphean insistence on pretending to be able to right historical wrongs – ought to be left alone. WADA isn't any good at it and each time they fail, they only remind the cheaters how easy it is.
Cathal Kelly