The World Anti-Doping Agency is supposed to be the end all, be all of the testing world for sports. It is supposed to set the standards, uphold them and remain neutral in all matters. However, on the eve of the 2016 Rio Olympics opening ceremonies a new report makes some explosive claims against the agency and its president, Sir Craig Reedie.
According to a report in the BBC, Jack Robertson, WADA’s former chief investigator and the man that initially handled the investigation into the alleged (and I use that term loosely) state-sponsored doping by Russia, had a few harsh things to say about the way things have been handled by WADA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In an interview with the investigative website ProPublica, Robertson claims the only way he got anything done in the investigation was by leaking information out to the public via the media. He claims that Reedie didn’t bother to act on information given to him by Robertson until the embarrassment of public pressure was put on him.
Craig Reedie, he had to be literally pressured into every investigation. Even the first one, he was reluctant despite the allegations, then the [German broadcaster] ARD documentary forced him into it. And then Reedie sent a message to the Russian ministry basically apologizing that they were being picked on. He sent an email to the Russian sports minister saying WADA had no intention of harming their friendship. And then later he wrote a note to Sergey Bubka [a gold medalist who competed for the Soviet Union and the Ukraine and is now vice president of IAAF, which governs track and field] to warn him about another doping documentary coming out, and it said, “Hope no more damage will be done.” To me, these showed his mindset, more committed to preserving his friends’ reputations than discovering the truth.
Robertson even compared the leadership of WADA to that of a deadly disease he knows a thing or two about after surviving it himself — cancer.
“I lost much of my voice to throat cancer, so I know a thing or two about cancer. And this is like cancer, if you don’t get all of it, it can come back worse.
“We’ve seen it in Fifa, you have to take out the boss, but you have to take out their henchmen, too, those who would follow them for their own careers. Everyone who supported them in their decisions has to go.”
The former head of the investigation into Russian state-sponsored doping allegations saved perhaps his harshest criticism for those in the IOC and the individual heads of their respective sports though, telling ProPublica that sport is seriously broken all over the world.
“The action the IOC took has forever set a bar for how the most outrageous doping and cover up and corruption possible will be treated in the future. Those involved in running sport are former athletes, so somehow I figured that they would have honor and integrity. But the people in charge are basically raping their sports and the system for self-interest. Sport is seriously broken.”
For Robertson, there wasn’t a question of Russian athletes doping or not, but rather how deep the corruption went in this scandal. What he found was a systemic failure within not just Russia, but across individual sport federations and throughout the world.
However, the biggest finding was the lack of care from those in leadership in those individual sport federations and within WADA itself according to his talk with BBC Sport on the eve of the 2016 Rio Olympic games.
Robertson said he had not comprehended the enormous scale of the doping problems facing sport when he agreed to joined Wada in 2011.
He said he “assumed” his focus would be on individual athletes but that “eventually progressed” to international sporting federations and countries.
“In addition to this, I saw the darker side of sport,” Robertson told BBC Sport. “I found the real culprits are not the athletes but rather those who are administrating sports.
With the games fast approaching, the IOC decided the pass the buck to the individual sport organizations, but it was WADA that really set the chain of events in motion. According to Robertson, WADA sat on the investigative findings for nearly a year before acting, and had it been immediate, the IOC and other governing bodies could’ve been fully prepared to act ahead of these Olympic games.
One has to wonder if these further revelations will cast even deeper doubt on a games already under intense suspicion from the public concerning how whether or not the athletes are indeed clean. How is anyone supposed to trust that the medal winners are clean?
WADA, the IOC, and a whole system seems to have failed the sport-loving public, and it has cast a serious doubt over the entire Olympic movement. Something tells me this story isn’t going away, even as the games themselves plow on in Rio.
