Track and field

Should Russia be disbarred from Rio?


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The Court for Arbitration in Sports (CAS) has pronounced its verdict.

The seat of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The IAAF-imposed ban on the Russian Athletics Federation stays.

No Russian track-and-field athlete will be competing in Rio—at least, not under their national flag.


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The International Olympic Committee will decide the fate of the Russian contingent when it meets today.

IOC headquarters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Lausanne, Switzerland – IOC seat Česky: Lausanne, Švýcarsko – sídlo MOV (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The CAS judgment is non-binding on the Committee.

WADA and predominantly western nations’ Olympic Committees are vocally in favour of a blanket ban on the rogue nation given clear and damning evidence of state-sponsored collusion in doping. They feel that the IOC must exhibit ‘zero–tolerance‘  towards systematic doping by any state. 

Olympic Games 1896, Athens. The International Olympic Committee. From Left to right, standing: Gebhardt (Germany), Guth-Jarkovsky (Bohemia), Kemeny (Hungary), Balck (Sweden); seated : Coubertin (France), Vikelas (Greece & chairman), Butovsky (Russia) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


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National Olympic Committees have been banned before—simply not for drug-related scandals.

Collective responsibility should not come at the cost of individual justice—the IOC is seeking a balance.

The Russian public believes that their country is being discriminated against by the Western world. They cannot accept that all their athletes are drugged.

A sanction against all Russian competitors would be unfair to those abiding by the rule book. 

While the IOC has several options before arriving at a final decision, a simple solution would be to allow the Russians to participate—both under their national banner and the Olympic one but have each one of their athletes subjected to both in-competition and out-of-competition testing.

This would allow clean athletes to breathe freely and hopefully deter sportspersons who are doping.

This would also send a strong message to errant national sports federations everywhere that unless they clean up their act, their athletes and their fellow countrymen will be treated like Caesar’s wife—not above suspicion.

Simply leaving the decision to international sports federations burdens them further and not all of them are fully equipped to make an informed decision on the matter.

Whatever the IOC’s decision, there will be no pleasing everyone.

That’s a given.

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Professionalism and the ethics of doping in sport

International Association of Athletics Federations members, as list in http://www.iaaf.org/insideIAAF/federations/index.html (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What’s normal, what’s not?

What’s a ‘zero tolerance’ policy?

Can rules and regulations prevent cheating?

These are all questions that the general public who follow athletics must be asking themselves and of the IAAF when shocking revelations of more than 800 athletes recorded one or more “abnormal” results over a period of 12 years.

Panoramic view of the olympic stadium of Berlin during the 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Are you surprised?

Am I?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is an emphatic no.

Why would we be? Why should we be?

We’re all aware that athletes, in these modern times, are as likely to be supremely naturally gifted yet equally likely to be products of laboratory concoctions.

The debate is age-old.

Science and its manifestations can be used for both good and bad.

The ethics of sports has undergone several changes over the past 100 years or so.

The term ‘professional‘ can denote both excellence as well as ruthlessness and unscrupulousness.

The numbers cited are bewildering; the conclusions are far-reaching—clean athletes are a  minority if not a myth.

Will there be a redistribution of medals, of prizes won and claimed?

Will that be enough?

Maybe it’s time to revert to games at a micro level, say, a village rather than the ‘global village’ that is the Olympics and the World Championships?

Mercifully, the tainting of athletes will not put off the amateur and sports lover from indulging in activities that taught them the benefits of regular exercise and notions of fair play.

Unmercifully, it should get them to tighten their purse strings when it comes to doling out cash to watch or cheer these ‘supercharged’ monstrosities or deviants.