From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
Maxim Vylegzhanin (bib #8), following teammate Ilya Chernousov (bib #5), on his way to 15 k classic pursuit victory in the second stage of the 2012/2013 Tour de Ski. It’s been reported that Vylegzhanin is among those named as an appellant in a suit filed with the Court of Arbitration for Sport. (Photo: Marcel Hilger)
A recently published Langrenn story reported on the possibility that FIS may be forced to reconsider its recent ruling an Russian and Belarusian eligibility for participating in Period 1 of the 2025-2026 World Cup season. According to those reports, Russian athletes and para athletes—and the Russian Ski Federation—filed a law suit with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) seeking to overturn the recent FIS decision to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from events this autumn (events that could allow athletes to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics). Included in the suit is former World Junior Champion (2022), Saveliy Korostelev. While details remain unfocused as to which other athletes are involved, it’s possible that former Russian stars, Alexander Legkov and Maxim Vylegzhanin, are also included in this law suit. That’s a curious list, since Legkov (who is thought to be retired) has not been a factor on the international stage since his two Olympic medals in 2014 (both of which were subsequently stripped from him following revelations of his involvement in Russian doping at those Sochi Olympic Games). Vylegzhanin’s two silver medals from Sochi were also stripped, but later reinstated. According to current reports, the skier who dominated Nordic events at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, Alexander Bolshunov, is not named as a participant in this suit.
In related news, the International Luge Federation (FIL) was recently sued by Russian athletes and federations under similar circumstances. CAS’ judgment in the case continued to exclude athletes from the Russian Luge Federation (RLF), while overturning FIL’s exclusion of Russian and Belarusian lugers who qualify as Neutral Athletes (AIN) . . . the end result being that FIL will need to set protocols and procedures for identifying AINs in order for any of those athletes to enter Olympic qualifying events this winter.
If the cross-country world is searching for precedent in their own case, this recent CAS/FIL ruling would seem to offer a direct parallel . . . and would seem to imply that it’s not unlikely that we may yet see Russian and Belarusian athletes toeing starting lines for Olympic cross-country events later this winter.
Sergei Ustyugov of Russia celebrates his victory in the 15 k biathlon mass start in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Russia.
Covering doping in sports like biathlon and cross-country skiing here in North America can make one feel self-rightous. The U.S. and Canada run clean systems if positive doping tests are the benchmark for suspicion. As far as we can tell, there’s been a single case involving a North American nordic sport athlete. In 1987, an American caused a stir after the 1987 Nordic World Championships in Oberstdorf, Germany. Kerry Lynch, a nordic combined skier, admitted to “bloodpacking”. (A glance into U.S. athletics and cycling, however, tells a different story altogether.)
Then there’s Russia! Russia! Russia!. Just right there, an appeal to doping angst with the use of an “!”, and a trifecta of “Russia” as if from a far far away time in our recent political history.
This week the Court for Arbitration for Sport’s anti-doping division ruled former Russian biathlete Evgeny Ustyugov guilty of an anti-doping rule violation. The ruling’s technical underpinnings turned on abnormalities in Ustyugov’s Athlete Biological Passport. He doped and was able to evade detection. His results from January 2010 until the completion of the 2013-2014 season were stripped. These include gold medals won at the 2010 and the 2014 Olympics.
Six years after the Sochi Games, a decade since Vancouver, the slow churn of justice in sport advances.
Since the Sochi Olympic flame smudged out and whistleblowers helped tease apart the deep-state Russian doping enterprise, FasterSkier has covered the case. And just this week I used an image of 2014 50 k freestyle Olympic champion Alexander Legkov as a lead photo for a doping related article. Too cynical a choice for a doping story photo? Maybe.
Alexander Legkov after winning the Olympic 50 k in 2014.
Legkov went through his own doping adjudication twists – he was implicated as an athlete who benefitted from Russia’s systematic doping program. Legkov was eventually cleared in a 2018 CAS decision and his 2014 gold medal was reinstated. At first appearance, the image of Legkov used in the earlier story is similar to others we have seen before: the euphoria of winning gold. But we all know, positive tests or not, CAS decision or not, the haze of Sochi doping evidence provides a “guilt by association” backdrop. That’s a tough bias to suppress.
Therese Johaug winning last season in Ruka, Finland. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Initially, Johaug was handed a 13-month ban by the Norwegian Ski Federation, which FIS appealed. She was eventually given an 18-month ban by CAS and missed the 2018 Olympics. Back on the scene beginning the fall of 2018, Johaug dominated distance racing. She claimed the 2019 distance World Cup globe and the Overall World Cup in 2020.
Right upfront, the authors of the study, Ulrik Wagne and Elsa Kristiansen, use terms like “national identity” and “national performance” to describe how humans often tend to bundle athletic prowess with how they think and feel about their home country. Chants of “U.S.A. -U.S.A.” anyone? Sports and identity commingle.
About Norway’s Johaug coverage the study’s authors write, “the media often propagate the claim that the administrative systems both monitoring and helping elite athletes have failed. Accordingly, the responsibility for the failure is transferred from the individual to the governing organisational level.” That’s jargon claiming the system failed Johaug.
Sweden, a country similar in its affinity for cross-country skiing, took a harder line against both Johaug and Norway. The authors claim, “Swedish discourses seem in favour of strict liability; thus, the issue of guilt can be ascribed to the individual athlete, who accordingly needs to receive a ban, and to Norwegian anti-doping policy, which is not as consistent as one would expect, and therefore requires a thorough investigation.” In other words, the main Swedish narrative was Johaug failed herself and Norway is no beacon of clean sport. (Prior to Johaug’s positive, claims of abusing asthma medication to boost athletic performance rattled Norwegian skiing.)
In some ways, the findings reinforce our propensity for tribalism. In this case, the national flag waving kind when international sport is used as a proxy for nation-state status. Norway became an easy foil for Sweden after projecting itself for years as above the temptation to dope. So maybe it’s no surprise that some Norwegian media showed a bias and deflected blame away from Johaug. And similarly, there’s no shock that some Swedish media asserted Johaug and a complicit system were at fault.
The analysis of Johaug’s doping coverage reveals that some media outlets were easily wrapped up in the game of asserting the superiority of one Scandinavian state over the other. Soft-power flexed just to the side of the ski tracks.
Which brings us back to Russia. With the Ustyugov ruling, all we can say is score one for the newly minted Biathlon Integrity Unit. Sport comes clean, eventually.
Holding off Norway’s Therese Johaug is Sweden’d Stina Nilsson during the 2019 World Championship 4 x 5 k relay in Seefeld, Austria. (Photo: John Lazenby/lazenbyphoto.com)
As for remaining unbiased on the tracks and settling scores, the stakes were high when Norway and Sweden went head-to-head in the 2019 World Championship 4 x 5 k relay. Johaug faded late in the final leg while Swedish speedster Stina Nilsson closed out down the final straight for the win. Nilsson has since switched to biathlon. Johaug continues to crush. The facts are this: all biases aside in Norway and Sweden, it was a lovely race and worth a re-watch.
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Bessmertnykh, Maxim Vyegzhanin, and Alexander Legkov were disqualified for doping, but had their bans overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The gold medalist was initially banned and ordered to turn over his medal. That happened after investigations by journalists and anti-doping administrators found that he had likely benefitted from a sample-swapping scheme instituted by the Russian government. The crowning achievement of the scheme came at the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where athletes’ “dirty” urine was swapped for “clean” samples so that their illicit doping would not be detected by tests.
On Monday, CAS released the details behind its decision in Legkov’s case.
In short, they did not find enough evidence that Legkov had personally been involved in the scheme, which they acknowledged existed. But testimony by whistleblowers and forensic evidence was not deemed to be enough to justify disqualifying him.
Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping laboratory, wrote in testimony to the Panel in January that Legkov had been involved in the doping scheme and had been instructed to provide clean urine samples so that they could be swapped out to hide dirty ones. Legkov had also participated in “washout testing,” he said, to determine how long drugs would stay in his body. He related conversations with higher-ups who told him that Legkov was a “special project”, and had notes in his diary from the 2014 Olympics which described swapping out Legkov’s urine sample after he won the 50 k.
The CAS panel didn’t agree with any of those assertions. The fact that Rodchenkov stated that Legkov was providing clean urine had little value, they wrote, because nobody testified to having seen him do it.
“The Panel notes that the IOC does not specify the particular date when, or location where, the Athlete is alleged to have provided clean urine for this purpose,” it writes. “Further, no physical evidence has been presented showing the specific vessel in which the clean urine from the Athlete is alleged to have been collected and stored. Nor has the Panel seen any communications sent by or to the Athlete that refer to the collection, transmission, storage or use of clean urine for the purpose of urine substitution.”
Regarding Legkov’s presence on the “Duchess list” of athletes receiving a special drug cocktail, and and Rodchenkov’s conversation with a boss who told him to make sure Legkov was protected, the panel wrote, “this evidence is hearsay and as such its probative value is very limited, particularly insofar as it relates to the Athlete’s subsequent actions during the Sochi Games in February 2014. In any event, even if it is accepted at face value, the alleged statement merely reflects an intention on Ms. Rodionova’s part. It does not provide any evidence regarding the actions or state of mind of the Athlete.”
Rodchenkov’s testimony was not the only aspect of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) case against Legkov. In addition, multiple marks were found on Legkov’s sample bottles, consistent with having been opened.
CAS did not buy this as evidence of an anti-doping rule violation either, however.
“The Panel considers that the fact that sample bottles were opened would, if established, provide considerable, albeit not conclusive, inferential evidence that urine was substituted and, as a further step of conclusion, the substituted urine contained prohibited substances,” they wrote.
After that, they tore apart the testimony of the expert who identified the marks on the bottle, writing that while he had established that such marks did not occur as part of “normal use”, they could have occurred when the bottles were being transported from one place to another.
Another criticism? That while the IOC’s chosen expert established “normal use” using empty bottles, the presence of urine in a bottle could change things. Maybe these marks might not actually be indicative of the bottles being opened. They wrote, “the Panel considers that there is some merit in the Athlete’s criticism that the failure to conduct tests on sample bottles that were filled with liquid reduces the probative value of the results of those tests.”
In total, they found that the existence of state-sponsored doping could not be used to punish Legkov without other strong evidence that he had benefitted – and didn’t deem any of the evidence presented to be strong enough.
“In reaching these conclusions, the Panel wishes to underscore what it has not decided in this appeal,” the panel wrote. “The Panel has not made a ruling on whether and to what extent the alleged doping scheme during the Sochi Games existed and how it operated even though it recognizes that there is significant evidence that it was in place and worked.”
Norway’s Marit Bjørgen celebrates her overall win in the last race of 2018 World Cup Finals, the 10 k freestyle pursuit, on March 18 in Falun, Sweden. Bjørgen officially announced her retirement from skiing last Friday, April 6. (Photo: Svenska Skidspelen/Instagram)
You’ve probably heard the news by now: Marit Bjørgen, the Norwegian queen of cross-country skiing, has decided to retire. The 38 year old made the announcement a week ago after winning the first race of Norwegian nationals, the 5-kilometer classic, on April 6.
“In reality it has been a long process,” she told NRK that day, according to a translation. “I had almost decided before the competitive season started. I feel that I lack the motivation and desire required to be right there in the top. I also have a little boy at at home, who is beginning to understand more and more, that I’d like to spend time with. That time I can never have again. It’s also a little frightening. This is been half of my life. This is emotional.”
The most decorated Winter Olympian of all time across all sports with 15 medals, five of which came at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang (two golds, a silver, and two bronze), Bjørgen closed her season on Saturday, April 7 with a second-place finish behind teammate Ragnhild Haga in the national 30 k freestyle in Alta, Norway.
“I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my career, but I’ve also been privileged to have been able to win top-level sports,” Bjørgen said in Norwegian team press release. “I am very much thankful to amazing team friends, teammates, coaches, medical team, service team, managers and the whole support crew that have been around me. You have a great deal of credit for my results.”
Teammates Marit Bjørgen (r) and Ingvild Flugstad Østberg after placing first and second, respectively, in the women’s 5 k classic at Norwegian nationals in Alta on April 6. (Screenshot: NRK broadcast)
Norway’s head coach Vidar Løfshus described Bjørgen as a “team captain” who was “always there for the girls,” according to an interview with NRK.
He added that she was also a valuable coaching consult.
“For me, she’s been a good sparring partner; when tough things happening internally, I often call Marit,” Løfshus said, according to a translation. “Now there will be one less coach in my team. There are a lot of good coaches in the association, but … [none that have] won so many medals. She knows more about cross country skiing then I do, Sju, Ole and Roar combined, almost.
“We can’t let a woman like that disappeared through the back door,” he said of his desire to keep Bjørgen involved with the team. “But now we’re gonna let her exhale and enjoy her time with [her son] Marius and [partner] Fred Børre. She has not had enough time for that. And after that I know she will contribute again.”
Bjørgen shared emotional moments with her teammates at nationals.
“She has been a role model to me for many many years,” Ingvild Flugstad Østberg told NRK.
“One day has to be the last,” Heidi Weng said. “We’ve had a lot of fun with Marit. She’s a legend. She has been the security blanket and the mother in the team. It’s frustrating not to have mommy at the starting line, someone to joke around with and calm your nerves. Someone who is supportive.”
Who else is on our list of notable cross-country retirements so far? (For our biathlon list, which should also include the additions of Norway’s Ole Einar Bjørndalen and Emil Hegle Svendsen, click here.)
Kikkan Randall (l) and Liz Stephen after the last race of their professional careers, the 30 k classic mass start at 2018 U.S. Distance Nationals in Craftsbury, Vt. (Photo: John Lazenby/Lazenbyphoto.com)
From the U.S., we have U.S. Ski Team members Kikkan Randall and Liz Stephen, who said ‘so long’ to international racing, while another team veteran Andy Newell told FasterSkier that he plans to continue racing, but apart from the national team and likely outside of the World Cup circuit.
Former national-team members Noah Hoffman and Kris Freeman have also announced their retirements from professional skiing. On the domestic side, Annie Hart has stated this was the last season of her ski career as she plans to begin law school.
There has been talk of a few of Canada’s World Cup Team members retiring, but the only one FasterSkier has confirmed so far is Graeme Killick.
Zina Kocher, a 2006, 2010 and 2014 Olympic biathlete who came out of retirement to make a bid for the 2018 Olympics in cross-country skiing, has stated that it’s really over this time after her comeback season.
“As I reflect on the last 16 years that I trained full-time and competed at an international level I’m flooded with a lot of memories,” Kocher, 35, wrote in a blog post last week. “If someone had told me when I started biathlon in ’98 that I would be a ‘lifer’ (aka someone who does the sport & can’t give it up till they’re an old veteran in their 30’s), I would have laughed and said ‘yea right’. But here I am, finally saying goodbye!”
Michael Somppi, of the Alberta World Cup Academy, is also retiring after 16 years of competitive skiing. Somppi, 29, a former member of Canada’s senior development team, won three national titles and World Cup start rights as Canada’s NorAm overall leader at the end of the 2014/2015 season.
“I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to in my ski career, but I am really proud of all that I did accomplish,” Somppi wrote in a blog post on Sunday. “I feel I got all I could out of myself given the circumstances I faced and the system I worked in. Thinking back to when I started out ski racing in high school, I am amazed how far I’ve come. ‘Started at the bottom, now we here!’ I picked up racing late and was never the most talented. I worked hard with extreme motivation and focus to become one of the top skiers in Canada.”
“One of the highlights of my career was certainly the team sprint with my brother Dario at the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi,” Gianluca wrote in a Facebook post announcing his retirement, according to a translation. “We reached the 5th place and could take home an [Olympic] diploma. It was not only a highlight because of the 5th rank, but also because our parents were there to witness it live. I never dreamed of anything like that when I was a little boy.”
Sweden’s Emil Jönsson celebrates a 2013 World Cup victory in Lahti, Finland. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
The Swedish team is seeing the exit of Anna Haag, Emil Jönsson and Martin Johansson. Haag, 31, won gold with the Swedish women’s relay at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and has four medals from the last three Olympics. Jönsson, 32, Haag’s longtime partner and an internationally renowned sprinter, earned two Olympic bronze medals in 2014.
From Finland, four-time World Championships gold medalist Aino-Kaisa Saarinen is stepping away from competitive skiing at age 39.
“I have done this 20 years, what I really wanted, and I have raced my goals and even more,” Saarinen told FasterSkier after the last race of World Cup Finals in Falun, Sweden. “This skiing family is the thing what I’m going to miss the most, and of course, I love the competitions. I don’t know any other job where you can feel so high and so low, so, maybe those are the feelings right now, what I’m going to really miss the most.”
Poland’s 35-year-old Justyna Kowalczyk, a two-time Olympic champion and two-time World Champion, has announced her retirement as well.
Then there’s Aurore Jean, 32, who became the second French woman to reach the cross-country World Cup podium with a second-place skate-sprint finish in 2013.
And last but not least (for now), we have heard news of Russia’s Alexander Legkov — the controversial 2014 Olympic champion who was not allowed to compete at this year’s Games because of Russia’s systematic doping in Sochi — officially retiring.
“You have all been with me in the course of many years of my professional career and I truly love you all,” the 35-year-old Legkov said at a sports tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, on April 6, according to the Russian News Agency. “… I will see all of you later, not at international tournaments, but perhaps at domestic tournaments or marathon. I am announcing the end of my international sports career.”
At the Sochi Games, Legkov won the 50 k freestyle mass start and took bronze with his teammates his the men’s 4 x 10 k relay. He ended his ski-racing career on March 3 in Rybinsk, Russia, where he placed fourth in the 50 k freestyle Demino Skimarathon.
Stay tuned for more retirement announcements as they are made public.
Russia’s Alexander Legkov (3) after winning Olympic gold in the men’s 50 k freestyle mass start at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Russia’s anti-doping director at the time, Grigory Rodchenkov stated that he switched out Legkov’s anti-doping sample for a vial of clean urine collected previously. The International Olympic Committee stripped Legkov of his gold medal and banned him from future Olympics, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned those sanctions in February 2018.
Editor’s Note: The following thoroughly cited opinion piece, prompted by the 2017 ‘Icarus’ documentary, was written by Maks Zechel, a 20-year-old Canadian cross-country skier who spent the 2017/2018 race season training abroad with Team Asker in Norway. Zechel is a regular contributor at FasterSkier, with his ongoing series: “Closing the Gap”.
***
February 23, 2014
Sochi: a home Olympics and the opportunity of a lifetime. Russia, despite being one of the strongest skiing nations in the world, has no individual medals in cross-country skiing leading into the final race of the championships. As the athletes shuffle nervously in the tracks before the 50 k mass start, the pressure on the Russian men can be felt even by me, watching on TV from home.
Putin is in the stands. It’s just a ski race, but how much more than that is at stake?
“The Moscow Laboratory operated, for the protection of doped Russian athletes, within a State-dictated failsafe system” (McLaren 1)
A sunny day, a roaring home crowd. Alexander Legkov is in a world of his own as he absolutely destroys himself over the final climb, skiing with the passion that it takes in all sports to win an Olympic medal. Russian flags waving everywhere, the crowd is absolutely deafening as Legkov adds his first Olympic gold to his already legendary career. Maxim Vylegzhanin and Ilia Chernousov lunge across the line behind him, with Chernousov having given every last bit of himself to outsprint Norway’s Martin Johnsrud Sundby to complete the Russian podium sweep on home soil. A dream come true.
“The Sochi Laboratory operated a unique sample swapping methodology to enable doped Russian athletes to compete at the Games” (McLaren 1)
When you ski with your teammates in front of your friends and family at home, you ski with a fire that is otherwise difficult to find. The presence of those who know you makes you feel guilty if you do not perform to your very best, you are pushed to keep up to those that your mind refuses to admit defeat against, and your own potential reaches new heights when your teammates accomplish something great. There is no cover of anonymity with which to hide the secrets behind your performance, because these people know what it took, and did not take, to get you to where you are.
“A pre-selected group of Russian athletes competing at Sochi were protected by the Sochi sample swapping methodology” (McLaren 67)
Despite the whispers of corruption surrounding Russia’s Olympic team, I cheered for those three skiers, who did the nigh-impossible and pushed their bodies as hard as anyone else to make their country proud. I do not know what exactly went into achieving that medal, but I do know that the incredible display of effort and the tears of happiness falling from Legkov’s face as he was raised onto his teammate’s shoulders, were very real.
“After he became laboratory director, and in furtherance of his responsibility to improve Russian sport performance by covering up doping, Dr. Rodchenkov developed a steroid cocktail optimized to avoid detection” (McLaren 49)
I first dreamt of going to the Olympics when I was 11 years old. This dream sparked an inner drive of mine that has lasted almost a decade, and I like to think that it will never extinguish. Sometimes, I wonder what lights that same flame in children around the world. In most countries, I like to think that many experience moments like mine: a motivation flourished from watching the passion of the Olympics, being inspired by older siblings, or being born with the need to be the first kid through the school doors when the bell rings for recess.
“The steroids were dissolved in alcohol … The solution was then swished in the mouth in order to be absorbed by the bucal membrane and then spit out … the detection window for the steroids in the cocktail would not exceed 3-5 days” (McLaren 49-50)
In parts of the world where fewer children are fortunate enough to make the decision to pursue a sport just because they are inspired, I wonder what brings them to those future championships. Is their talent used out of joy or out of the need to provide for those without the same athletic abilities? Was their talent exploited at a young age as a way for a country to show its dominance? Were they given a choice: to follow their dreams and do what they love by the prescribed method, or to not follow their heart at all?
I think about the lengths that I would go to support my family if they depended on me, and suddenly the way that I pursue sport seems insignificant, a trivial lifestyle “earned” through right of birth. Being born to these opportunities makes it all the more important to not waste them. My great-grandfather used to say, “if you’re going to do something, then you may as well do it right”, and those are words that I attempt to live by. To me, that means clean sport.
But clean sport is now more at risk than it has been in decades. Once an already colossal task of catching individual dirty athletes, we are now facing an extensive doping regime, backed by an entire government.
“[B]y the time of the Olympic Games in London, many of Russia’s top athletes were using the cocktail” (McLaren 51)
When faced with the enormity of the Russian state-sponsored doping system, it is no longer adequate to simply prosecute individual athletes. A large part of the problem when it comes to justly dealing with the system that made it possible for Russian athletes to cheat, is that WADA and the IOC are pitted against the entirety of the Russian government. It is not the USA and Canada versus Russia, or any other country versus Russia; it is two sporting entities, independent of any particular country, against the full power of the Russian government.
“The Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athlete’s analytical results or sample swapping, with the active participation and assistance of the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service], CSP [Center of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia], and both Moscow and Sochi Laboratories” (McLaren 1)
“… Deputy Minister of Sport, Yuri Nagornykh, was appointed in 2010 by Executive Order of then Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin” (McLaren 10)
The state-run doping program organized for the Sochi Olympics was not just about sport, it was politically motivated, overseen by President Putin himself. This sets Russia apart from previous doping scandals, such as that of the Finnish cross-country ski team in 2001, where doping operations were concentrated to a select number of skiers and their coaches. When the truth was uncovered about their national heroes, Finland, in complete shock, took steps to recover from the international disgrace that its ski team had brought upon them (Andrews). Iivo Niskanen and Krista Pärmäkoski have proven that it is possible for a great skiing nation to recover from such a disaster and win clean, paving the way for the next generation of Finnish skiers.
“ … this Article would prohibit altering identification numbers on a Doping Control form during Testing, breaking the B bottle at the time of B Sample analysis, or altering a Sample by the addition of a foreign substance” (“World Anti-Doping Code” 21)
The situation we see today is different. After the exposure of irrefutable evidence confirming state-sponsored doping and the covering up of doping evidence in Russia, it came as a disappointment to many when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) annulled the sanctions imposed by the IOC on 28 Russian athletes.
The evidence of coverups and doping are clear, but the CAS ruling was that “the evidence collected was found to be insufficient to establish that an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) was committed by the athletes concerned” (“Media Release”). The evidence may be adequate to find Russia guilty of state-sponsored doping, but it is not enough to build a case against each individual athlete. This is likely because of the destruction and tampering of drug tests and results by Russian “anti”-doping personnel and Article 10.5.1.2 of the World Anti-Doping Code, which states that, if the “detected Prohibited Substance came from a Contaminated Product, then the period of Ineligibility shall be, at a minimum, a reprimand and no period of Ineligibility, and at a maximum, two years Ineligibility” (“World Anti-Doping Code” 64).
But if the evidence is inadequate, then why are some Russian athletes still facing penalties? Alexander Legkov and Sergey Ustiugov were both unable to compete at the PyeongChang Olympics, but Ustiugov can still race on the World Cup, while Legkov cannot. Evidence against athletes like Legkov proves that they were in some way a part of the state-sponsored doping program, but it is difficult to legitimately sentence them when evidence proving exactly what they have done has been tampered with or destroyed. Athletes like Ustiugov have not been proven to be a part of Russian doping operations, but have violated Article 2.1 of the World Anti-Doping Code through their association with people who are a part of it. This article states that “Athletes and other Persons must not work with coaches, trainers, physicians or other Athlete Support Personnel who are Ineligible on account of an antidoping rule violation … Prohibited association need not involve any form of compensation. (“World Anti-Doping Code” 24).
Sport in Russia will never be fair until Russia takes responsibility for their crimes against clean sport. Whereas Finland bore the weight of what their athletes had done in 2001, and ensured that it would never happen again, the Russian government has more at stake than a few drugged athletes. When doping is politically motivated and backed by the state, I do not think it is possible to solve the issue through sanctions by sporting bodies such as WADA and the IOC alone. Until the Russian government is pushed by other nations to take an interest in ensuring that sports in Russia are clean, the problem can never be completely resolved.
Until substantial action is taken, we will continue to be caught up in a stalemate of “partial blanket bans” and other half-measures. When imposed on a level of command that is too low in the Russian doping system, these actions cannot bring about the outright eradication of doping that we seek. Are sports a high enough priority for entire countries to impose sanctions on the Russian government until they answer for their crimes against clean sport? Or will doping be protected by other political motivations that keep Russia inseparable from the rest of the world? The scope of the Russian government’s involvement in doping is far beyond the reach of traditional sporting sanctions.
“Clean sport is dead” — Jim Walden, lawyer of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov (Panja and Pérez-Peña).
The sporting world no longer holds its breath in anticipation of change. An uncertain future exists for clean sport, but even more disconcerting is the stagnation in which we now settle. With the anti-doping world left spinning its tires in frustration, where does that leave athletes for whom a future of fair play is too late?
Icarus, 2017 documentary film, debuted Aug. 4, 2017 on Netflix (Photo: Wikipedia)
In his dramatic documentary, Icarus, director Bryan Fogel convinced many sports fans that clean athletics, despite the improvement of anti-doping efforts over the years, is a hopeless pursuit. Fogel’s documentary was key to bringing the extent of systematic doping in Russia into the public eye.
In Icarus, Fogel takes anti-doping research to a personal level: after years of training as a high-level (amateur) cyclist, he spends a full year preparing for the “Haute Route” amateur cycling event, while following a doping program. This was prescribed to him by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov (the former director of Russia’s Anti-Doping Center, turned whistleblower, who is now under the witness protection program in the U.S.).
Fogel routinely took a cocktail of PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs), under the careful guidance of Dr. Rodchenkov, and saw massive improvements in his power output ratings on the bike in less than a year. Having placed 14th in the seven-day Haute Route event the previous year, while racing clean, it seemed clear that Fogel would be a strong contender for the win.
He ended up finishing the unbelievably hard event in a far worse position than when he raced clean. From an athlete’s perspective, this does not surprise me. I understand that there are countless elements involved in producing an incredible athletic performance at a set time and place. Fogel’s reaction was different; visibly depressed, he talked of how sobering it was to realize that, no matter what he did, he could never be as great as his cycling heroes. This is a delusional conclusion, one that is biased by his dreams (influenced by growing up with Lance Armstrong as a hero) of becoming a better cyclist.
In these turbulent times for clean sport, it is important for athletes to remember that there are many aspects to training and competing, aside from other athletes cheating, that they can control. Living in Norway has taught me that there is a lot more to skiing fast than just being fit, and that applies to all sports.
Drugs don’t magically make you a fast skier, just like a high VO2 max score doesn’t make you a competitive World Cup skier. There are many elements to cross-country skiing that have a far bigger effect on a skier’s ability to ski fast than drugs do. If skiing were purely about fitness, aerobic machines like Hans Christer Holund would beat skiers with a lower VO2 max, like Petter Northug and Finn Hågen Krogh, without contest. Divergent technique revolutions, like those brought to us by pioneering skiers such as Petter Northug and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, show us just how many ways there are to win a ski race.
In his reaction to not becoming a better cyclist even while doping, Bryan Fogel shows what he is: a film director with a remarkable story to tell. As most people would, he takes his failures in sport and attributes them to his personal characteristics; he feels he is simply not good enough at a genetic level. While not everyone will reach their athletic dreams, true failure occurs only when you stop trying after the first attempt. When athletes make changes to their training, it is rare to see dramatic results in the following competition season. Some things will never yield improvements, while other things take a few years of consistent work before they take effect. In the highly competitive world of cross-country skiing in Norway, many skiers go unnoticed down the results list for years, they are seen as average, before suddenly rocketing to incredible new heights seemingly out of nowhere. That is the nature of how training, competition, and life stress the body and mind over a prolonged period of time. To take a one-year snippet of an athlete’s life and make broad conclusions about sport is naive.
An otherwise brave and instructive self-experiment that helped uncover the scope of how doping continues to mar the sporting world uncontestedly, Fogel’s conclusion of his doping experiment sends the wrong message to the audience viewing Icarus. The message he sends is that only extremely gifted humans can become great athletes. This personal look into how his experiences have affected him make his documentary engaging and dramatic, something that the genre normally lacks for your average movie audience. The devastation that Fogel portrays in this realization hits viewers hard and the movie adopts an “apocalyptic” tone from that point on. The worldwide end of clean sport is confirmed with Rodchenkov’s exposé of Russian state-sponsored doping and the footage of him escaping Russia with his life in danger. Icarus uncovers frightening realities that affect the sports we love, but the film also incites new dangers to the culture surrounding sport.
Although accurate in their severity, the events at the end of Icarus doom its audience to pessimism against the current world of sports. This acts as fuel for ungrounded accusations against successful athletes by uninformed viewers. When a complicated issue arises, people quickly try to make sense of it by looking for a distinction between good and evil. By making an issue seem black and white, anyone can have a strong opinion about it, because the choosing of sides is based on your morals. You are either against doping, or you support it. Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple, but this type of inflamed, unschooled “debate” is perfect advertising for a film such as Icarus.
When making conclusions about an issue, it is our duty to question how someone else’s portrayal of events is affecting our opinion and to keep ourselves informed. FasterSkier Editor-at-Large Chelsea Little is an example of the brave reporting and investigating that it takes to keep organizations such as WADA and the IOC held accountable. We owe it to journalists like Chelsea, who sacrifice countless hours of their personal lives to enlighten us about the issues that affect us the most, to simply read their vital research. We must take the facts from the sources available to us, and add our own informed debate to the world of sport, because angry, baseless commentary are what keep humanity from moving forward.
Most Olympic athletes…would favour lifetime bans for doped athletes. IOC President, Thomas Bach, himself an Olympic champion, has publicly indicated a personal preference for life bans, but has correctly noted that the legal order, particularly in relation to human rights issues, will not permit such automatic sanctions, for first offences. Nor does the Code. The IOC itself has lost an appeal before CAS in respect of an IOC rule providing for the automatic exclusion of any doped athletes from Olympic competition in the Olympic Games next following the imposition of even a first doping sanction. (Pound, et al. 63)
It is our responsibility as athletes to represent all of those that have helped us and to lead by example. We can start with the atmosphere that we create amongst our fellow athletes. The culture of discrimination and groundless accusations against clean, Eastern-European athletes, or any successful athlete in endurance sports, has to stop. The “blame game” has some of the same ill-effects on our sport that we are trying to prevent by fighting against doping. Remember how ashamed Canadians felt when Ben Johnson, our “Olympic champion hero”, was caught for doping? Now imagine the irreversible damage that would have been done if he had been falsely accused. By telling young athletes that anyone doing something impressive — something that we could not imagine ourselves doing — is doping, teaches young athletes that no matter how hard they work, they will never become greater than their biggest dreams.
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men [people] who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” — John F. Kennedy (“J.F.K. in Ireland”)
Teach young people to dream outside the realms of what they see as possible, and they will get there via the path you set them.
Athletes have the power to make more of a difference than just complaining about the flaws of their sport. Sports are visually flashy and exciting to an audience, and athletes are celebrated around the world for their raw fight against the limits of the human body. The hero-status of athletes gives them a sphere of influence greater than that of other members of society who work equally hard, or harder, in the goal of helping people.
The playing field of sport will never be equal for every child born on earth, when some athletes fight past obstacles far greater than the trials of sport, just to get to the start line. If we are lucky enough to be living the life of an athlete, it is not enough just to win medals.
Endurance sports may not get the same extent of attention as soccer, football, or basketball, but the popularity of these sports has elevated some athletes to leadership roles from which athletes from smaller sports can learn. Take LeBron James, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, who has recently come under fire for his comments regarding President Trump. Some feel that his place in society is to play basketball and entertain, not to comment on political events, but he has decided that his popularity gives him a greater responsibility than just playing sports:
“I mean too much to society [to ‘shut up and dribble’] … I mean too much to the youth, I mean too much to so many kids that feel like they don’t have a way out and they need someone to help lead them out of the situation they’re in.” — LeBron James (Conway)
As a Canadian, the opportunity that I have to pursue cross country skiing is a selfish privilege. I have the chance to use sport to meet new people, to inspire, and to use my experiences and influences to create a better world around me. Otherwise, I am just a lucky individual, riding on the support of those that I do little to help, enjoying what I have been given and doing little to share my wealth. I work hard at what I do, but to think that I am an inspiration to others simply through my existence would be incredibly pretentious. Athletes can gloat in their athletic prowess, or they can use their abilities to promote the joy of sport, health of body and mind, and the hard work involved in reaching a goal.
Good leadership is to rise and accept challenges even with the possibility of failure. Leaders show their true qualities, and that shows others that they can only achieve success by being their honest selves. Leaders show that there are no shortcuts.
My heart breaks every time that one of my idols is suspected of cheating. It doesn’t hurt because it’s unfair; it hurts because I saw myself in their footsteps, and every time they succeeded, I saw that I could, too. Our dreams scare us because they seem impossible from where we currently stand. When I look at my heroes, I see my future; they are living my dreams, proving them possible. My dreams are crushed when one of my favourite athletes is caught for doping, because that tells me that I am not good enough to be great. Some say that we watch the Olympics to witness the impossible happen, but I watch the Olympics to see the people who started off where I am accomplish the things that seem impossible to me now.
Despite the damning evidence against Russian sport as a whole, I refuse to believe that every Russian athlete is doping for the same reasons that I refuse to believe that the majority of top cross-country skiers are doping. It must be remembered that skiers are people, and the vast majority of people who have grown up surrounded by the positive and welcoming culture that exists in cross-country skiing around the world, do not become cheaters. Even in Norway, where skiing culture is on a much bigger scale than that of North America, it remains a community of people who love being outside year-round, exploring the world around them and the limits of their bodies.
We must keep sport a positive and safe space for people to grow into compassionate citizens of the world. Clean sport isn’t important just so that medals are handed out to the rightful winners; sport must remain possible for real people everywhere, because when doping is left unchecked, sport loses all significance as a tool to inspire, bring people together, and make the world a better place.
March 2, 2011
Alex Harvey (r) and Devon Kershaw (l) celebrating their World Championships gold in 2011 in Oslo.
My heart pounds in my chest. Adrenaline courses through my body as my ungainly 13-year old legs run chaotically down the front steps. The slam of the door behind me pierces the stillness of the heavy evening air, but to my ears the whole world is alive in celebration. The rush of blood in my ears is deafening as I relive the race in my head. Alex passing Hattestad — shushing the crowd across the line –raising his arms in disbelief — Devon and Alex playing air guitar on their skis — walking before the massive crowd to the top step of the podium — WORLD CHAMPIONS! … The excitement settles into a glow that becomes an immovable rock of confidence in my chest. I start to notice where I am, running aimlessly to the top of a grassy hill above the trees. I smile as I look down to where I came from: “Yes”, I think, “I can do it, too.”
***
Works Cited
Andrews, Edmund L. “Olympics; Finland Reels Over Skiers’ Drug Scandal.” New York Times, 13
“John F. Kennedy in Ireland.”, John F. Kennedy: Presidential Library and Museum, www.Jfklibrary.org/Exhibits/Past-Exhibits/JFK-in-Ireland.aspx. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
FasterSkier’s Alex Kochon, Nat Herz, and the author (Chelsea Little) at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Little did we know what was going on behind the scenes of those Games. Looking back at our coverage of the 2014 Olympics, I’m very proud of the work we did. But I’m not too proud to say that while we thought we had a realistic understanding of international sports governance, we were still naive to its incredible inertia.
The following is an editorial written by FasterSkier’s Editor-at-Large Chelsea Little, who has been covering doping in sport, specifically cross-country and biathlon, for the better part of the last decade. The opinions expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of other FasterSkier staff.
The athletes had been disqualified from the 2014 Games by an International Olympic Committee (IOC) Commission. This was after more than 18 months of buildup in which the world learnt of systematic manipulation of the anti-doping process by the Russian state security apparatus at those Olympics.
I was both shocked, and not shocked. When all these athletes had been disqualified by the IOC and handed lifetime bans from Olympic competition, I knew in my heart of hearts that it would be undone (I’ll explain why below). But I hadn’t, somehow, put any thought into how exactly that would come to pass. So on one level, I was surprised, even if on another level I wasn’t.
When the news broke, I had written a profanity-laced all-caps message on our company Slack channel. On Twitter, I wrote, “I am so tired. That means that they have won.” That’s about all I could muster.
“I’m sure you are extremely disappointed by the CAS ruling,” one member of my extended family wrote in an email, knowing how many nights and weekends I had spent covering this story, how many hours and days of my personal life I had erased to chase it, because doing so does not pay the bills if you work for a cross-country ski website in America.
And I was disappointed.
I had thought that those nights and weekends would help make a better sporting world, help bring cheating to light, help hold the powers that be in sport accountable and call on them to do a little better.
But it felt like all that work had accomplished nothing, not changed a single thing to make nordic sports more fair.
I can only imagine how the athletes felt. The ones who found out that they would not be receiving medals after all, medals that they felt had been stolen from them by cheaters, medals that they had been slated to finally receive but now would never see.
I can only imagine.
More than anything, I was disappointed because I didn’t understand. I’m an analyst. No analysis I could do would explain to me just what had happened because CAS did not release a reasoned argument for their decision, which, as USADA General Cousel Bill Bock pointed out, is ludicrous. So at the moment we don’t know why these athletes were cleared; we only have speculation and hearsay.
In that decision, an arbitration panel wrote that they trusted the statements of whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov and investigator Richard McLaren.
That testimony that is widely speculated to have been found untrustworthy by the arbitration panel which more recently cleared the athletes.
There is a difference between provisional suspensions and rule violations, and maybe that’s the root cause (or maybe it’s not; one day we will find out).
But if two different arbitration panels can come to two completely different conclusions about whether evidence is trustworthy, then what is the point of a “high court” of arbitration? That’s disappointing.
On the other hand, maybe the new panel did believe that the whistleblower testimony was true, but that witness statements alone are not enough to prove a doping violation. We’ll set aside for a moment all the forensic evidence [see footnote 1].
If that’s the case, it’s even more disappointing. It means that all of the rhetoric over the last few years about putting more resources into investigations will not actually result in cleaner sport, unless there is a positive test or the presence of drugs or medical equipment (see: Austrian skier Wurm, Russian skier Pankratov).
It would mean that the World Anti-Doping Agency’s new “secure digital platform” for whistleblowing — and statements by athletes and doctors and team staff — are all useless to anti-doping unless they are followed by physical evidence of prohibited substances or methods.
But we don’t know the panel’s reasoning. This is all just speculation.
I was tired and disappointed because my job as a journalist is to take complicated things, and make them make sense to our readers.
Here, there was nothing to work with. There was nothing to explain.
A second suggested storyline is that the IOC set up the cases to fail, so that it would look like they tried to do something heroic, but in the end nothing would change.
To some extent, that is absolutely the case. Lifetime bans for doping have been attempted by the IOC before. Every time, they have been overturned. There was a zero percent chance it would work this time, either.
Did the IOC go further than that in “set up to fail”? Both storylines may be true. Neither may be true. But each of these storylines is far too myopic in their attempts to explain what happened with this CAS decision.
The reason that, in my heart of hearts, I knew that things would turn out just fine for most of these seemingly disqualified athletes, is that far more than CAS is broken [2].
Broken would imply that at some point the system worked. When was that, again?
This scandal has been going on for years. And in both it and other, non-Russia-related doping scandals, organizations have dragged their feet at every turn. There is no political will to keep sport clean. Ensuring clean sport would be hard. Nobody wants to do hard work. Universally, these organizations just want to run sporting events and for fans to be happy.
“We need to stop pretending sport is clean,” International Ski Federation (FIS) President Gian Franco Kasper [3] famously told New York Times reporter Rebecca Ruiz. “It’s a noble principle, but in practice? It’s entertainment. It’s drama.”
People were mad when Kasper said this, but it was an especially revealing comment. Maybe it is a testament to our optimism that we quickly moved on, focusing on how we would try to “solve” the problem of doping.
There have been individuals and groups who have worked passionately to uncover the truth, and done an admirable job. Beckie Scott at WADA [4] is one who comes to mind. But their work is always prevented from reaching its logical conclusion.
Let’s first look at the IOC, which has deservedly gotten a bad rap for dragging its investigations out for as long as seems humanly possible.
The IOC has certainly not put the resources or good-faith effort into looking under every stone, or doing so quickly. That’s how we got the first Sochi disqualifications – like Legkov’s – being announced in November of 2017. Most of the criticism leveled at the organization on this front is absolutely justified.
In all the time between May 2016, when the Sochi scandal was first broken by the New York Times, and November 2017, the IOC did very little. The decision banning Legkov relied mostly on the same evidence that had been in the McLaren Report.
The IOC Commission asked new experts to revisit the issues of scratches on sample bottles and salt content of urine samples. Basically, they repeated a lot of work which had already been done, expanding it to a larger number of samples but taking longer to do so by insisting on using different experts, who nonetheless came to the same conclusions.
For Legkov, all of this resulted in the same evidence that had been in the McLaren Report: that Legkov’s sample bottle from after the 50 k, which he had won, showed signs of being tampered with.
Sure, the IOC Commission got testimony from Rodchenkov. But that only at the last minute, perhaps because they were publicly shamed when it was revealed that they hadn’t contacted him.
It’s fair to criticize the IOC for its anemic investigation, but this is not just an IOC problem, just like the disqualifications being overturned is not really a CAS problem.
Look further. Since the McLaren Report, few other governing bodies have been doing better.
“We like to play coy, like the cat wagging its tail when the mouse runs in front,” IBU Vice President for Medical Issues Jim Carrabre told me back at the 2014 Olympics, in an interview that led to the IBU’s media chief calling me into his office at the press center and dressing me down for talking about things that he would rather journalists didn’t ask his organization’s board members.
“It goes by once or twice, and then the third time it gets bitten,” Carrabre said at the time.
He was referring to blood profiles, a topic that has recently gained prominence.
For years I have been told by various people that the IBU has cases in the works, that soon I will hear about them, that they know some people are doping and are about to catch them.
I don’t doubt that Carrabre is a true believer in the anti-doping fight. He gets pretty fired up about things, as does fellow Executive Board member Max Cobb.
But the cases that I heard rumors of, even promises of, have never materialized.
The Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) was supposed to revolutionize anti-doping and indicate if athletes had been blood doping even when no illicit substance was detected. That sure would have been handy due to the drugs’ short detection windows and athletes’ and doctors’ strategies of “microdosing.”
But there have been no doping bans on the basis of ABP in skiing or biathlon [5]. I don’t think that even the most optimistic of fans really believes that this is because there is no blood doping going on.
What does that mean? That ABP doesn’t work, that it wouldn’t hold up in arbitration? Or that something else is going on?
It would be hard to look at IBU President Anders Besseberg’s behavior in the last two years – for instance, the IBU’s continued insistence that it’s totally fine to hold events in Russia, or his demeanor and statements during meetings with athletes – and conclude anything other than that he is sympathetic to Russia and would even more generally like to simply pretend that there was no scandal in his sport.
Having a few true anti-doping crusaders on a governing board does not clean sport make. I don’t want to put words into their mouths, but probably, it just makes these crusaders even more frustrated.
“When the McLaren Report first came out, I thought that doping was the greatest threat to our sport,” U.S. biathlete Susan Dunklee told FasterSkier in January 2017. “However after watching the last few weeks play out, I believe that the IBU’s reluctance to meaningfully act to prevent doping is the greatest threat to our sport.”
Then there is FIS. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there were 46 skiers implicated in the McLaren report. Not all of them, obviously, were at the 2014 Olympics or Paralympics, yet as far as anyone can tell, FIS has done nothing to investigate the other cases, some of which include alleged anti-doping rule violations.
(Which, by the way, how can I get in on that? Hi? I’m over here! I know a lot about doping in skiing and I also how to do statistics!)
The data is interesting, but nothing can really be done with it, as it is old and from the days before ABP was a policy. Without the journalists or their experts explaining how they decided what an “abnormal or highly abnormal” blood profile is, it’s impossible to judge what percentage of the athletes they identify as potentially having doped actually were likely dopers.
But perhaps this indicates that someone within FIS is frustrated with how things are going. If you cared about skiing being clean, cared about doing your job well, and listened to Kasper say things like “sanctioning entire countries is purely political and I do not agree with this,” you might be frustrated too.
And here’s the last thing. In this whole scandal we are talking about one country. That’s Russia, and it has led to a lot of ideological discussion.
But it’s not really about Russia.
Yes, the IOC and the IBU and FIS want to keep Russia happy, because their sports are popular in Russia, the Russian athletes are talented and popular even outside the country, because Russia is great at hosting events, and because Russian fans travel all over to watch competitions. That’s part of it.
And yes, some commentators have complained that athletes are being punished just because they are Russian. They have complained that this is a U.S.-led effort reviving Cold War hostilities. That we are Russophobes. That we are hypocrites because American sports stars dope too, and/or that lots of countries dope but we just haven’t found out about it.
But again, that’s being far too myopic about things, and believing that this scandal is only a thing unto itself, not part of the bigger problem.
If this scandal had taken place with Norway, Sweden, Germany, the United States, or any other country at the center – the outcome or the (lack of) speed of its resolution probably wouldn’t have been much different [6].
I – yes, I’m among those journalists accused of being hypocritical and anti-Russian, I’ve even been compared to Nazis, gee that was fun – I would chase this scandal just as hard if it had arisen in any of these other countries.
In fact, I would have investigated it with even more fervor if these were American or Canadian skiers and biathletes we were talking about. And presumably most of the evidence would have been in English, so I could investigate more effectively, without translating things I was looking for into Russian, searching the internet or evidence documents, and then translating the Russian back into English, in a crappy game of “telephone”.
I think that the North American athletes I routinely interview are aware that if I found out they were cheating, I would have no remorse and they would have nowhere to hide.
Just as I’m not a hypocrite, these sports organizations aren’t, either – well, they are, but not in this way, not when it comes to nationality. The claims that various decisions just come from Russian money and bribes are missing the point.
Whether coming from Russia or elsewere, these organizations don’t want a big scandal. They don’t want to rewrite their results sheets. The athletes who missed out on medals they probably should have taken home? These organizations don’t really care about athletes.
They are just an unfortunate bit of collateral damage, but oh well.
Time will march on. A new race will be held. It will be an exciting race! We will all be caught up in it.
Maybe Pellegrino will upset Klæbo.
Maybe an American will finally win a medal.
Maybe Fourcade will mess up his first stage, but then climb back to gold anyway.
Maybe Makarainen will mess up all her shooting stages, and we will all watch rapt to see whether she can pass 15 people on the final loop. Maybe she can.
Maybe Harvey will finally truly become the Prince of Quebec, crowned with an Olympic medal.
Maybe the breakaway will succeed.
Or maybe the favorite will win, but we will be enthralled until the final moment, watching to see whether they will pull it off.
Soon, we will forget about those athletes whom we were wondering about, the ones who maybe probably should have a medal stashed in their safe deposit box somewhere and a whole lot more sponsor money than they have now.
Those athletes will slip farther and farther to the back of our minds. In the forefront will be the day’s competition – so amazing! – and the big happy family that is sport.
Actual clean sport is not, and never was, these organizations’ goal.
*****
Footnotes:
[1] On the topic of skiers who were cleared by CAS: Maxim Vylegzhanin’s sample from Sochi also had scratches on it and had an incorrectly reported specific gravity; the two other members of the men’s relay team also had marks on their sample bottles, and one had a sample whose specific gravity was too high to be believable; two sprinters had marks on their sample bottles and for one, there as also a foreign fiber inside the bottle. Julia Ivanova, whose ban was not overturned by CAS, had an impossibly high salt value in her urine sample.
[2] I actually think CAS does work. CAS handles far more than doping cases – they handle contract disputes, team selection, trades, anything you can think of that would need arbitration. And as far as I know, they do a good job. This is the first CAS decision that has left me truly baffled.
[3] Term limits, man. We really, really need term limits.
[4] I’m not going to talk in much detail in this piece about WADA, which alternatingly does the right thing and the wrong thing, and often does the wrong thing for a very long time first. But at least in the last year or so, WADA is no worse than any other group, and indeed maybe a bit better.
[5] Blood profiles have certainly led to targeted testing, which caught athletes before the 2014 Olympics. But nobody bothered to try an ABP case, that we know of. Nor, seemingly, did the biathletes that the McLaren Report alleges were doping – Olga Vilukhina and Yana Romanova – fail their ABP’s. Either ABP is not being used, or it is not being successful and the details of the cases are never made public.
[6] If the perpetrator of this scandal hadn’t been Russia, I think the main difference might have been the reaction within that different country. I don’t think the Norwegian public would react the same way the Russian public has. Each place has its own culture around sport and what it means, and government also plays various different roles in supporting and controlling sport. But the reaction from the international organizations? Things would probably be much the same.
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Bessmertnykh, Maxim Vyegzhanin, and Alexander Legkov were disqualified for doping, but just had their bans overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has overturned doping bans assigned to eight cross-country skiers based on investigations into manipulation of the anti-doping process at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
“In 28 cases, the evidence collected was found to be insufficient to establish that an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) was committed by the athletes concerned,” CAS wrote in a press release. “With respect to these 28 athletes, the appeals are upheld, the sanctions annulled and their individual results achieved in Sochi 2014 are reinstated.”
The athletes whose results will be reinstated are:
50 k gold medalist and relay silver medalist Alexander Legkov
50 k silver medalist, team sprint and relay silver medalist Maxim Vylegzhanin, also fourth in the 30 k skiathlon
relay silver medalist Alexander Bessmertnykh, also seventh in the 15 k classic
Evgeny Belov, 19th in the 30 k skiathlon and 25th in the 15 k classic
team sprint silver medalist Nikita Kriukov, also 13th in the men’s sprint
Alexei Petukhov, eighth in the men’s sprint
Evgenia Shapovalova, 28th in the women’s sprint
Natalia Matveeva, 20th in the women’s sprint
The disqualifications of skiers Julia Ivanova, Yulia Tchekaleva, and Anastasia Dotsenko were upheld, although CAS held that instead of being banned from the Olympics for life, the three women were merely banned from the 2018 Games.
The cases of biathletes Olga Zaitseva, Olga Vilukhina, and Yana Romanova have not yet been handled.
The eight athletes whose disqualifications were overturned had not been invited to the 2018 Olympics, and many other Russian athletes who had not been convicted of doping offenses also did not meet the IOC’s requirements of proof of being clean either. Thus, it is doubtful whether the CAS appeals will affect the Olympic rosters.
CAS did not release any information about how the arbitration panel came to its decision.
“Although the operative part of the decision is issued, the principle of confidentiality of the procedure still applies,” Legkov’s lawyer, Christof Wieschemann, wrote in a statement emailed to the media. “I assume that all parties involved will respect this. The panel has to decide in its judgment what details of the proceedings becomes subject of the reasoning of the decision and therefore will also become public. We will wait for the reasoned decisions.”
The evidence in the McLaren report showed, for instance, that anti-doping sample bottles belonging to Legkov, Vylegzhanin, Shapovalova, and Petukhov, among others, showed marks consistent with having been tampered with. A sample belonging to Vylegzhanin also showed discrepancies in the reported specific gravity.
There was no explanation offered as to why this evidence is not valid in proving an anti-doping rule violation.
Likewise, CAS offered no explanation as to why this testimony was not sufficient to prove an anti-doping rule violation.
“Dr. Rodchenkov testified fully and credibly at CAS,” Rodchenkov’s lawyer, Jim Walden, wrote in a statement. “His truth has been verified by forensic evidence, other whistleblowers, and, more recently, recovery of the Moscow lab’s secret database, showing thousands of dirty tests that were covered up. The panel’s unfortunate decision provides a very small measure of punishment for some athletes but a complete ‘get out of jail free’ card for most. Thus, the CAS decision only emboldens cheaters, makes it harder for clean athletes to win, and provides yet another ill-gotten gain for the corrupt Russian doping system generally, and Putin specifically.”
Russia’s Natalia Matveeva (l) winning a World Cup sprint in January, 2017. Matveeva was sanctioned for using EPO in 2009, but has returned to competition; a provision in an IOC decision would bar her from competing in the 2018 Olympics, but is almost guaranteed to be struck down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. (Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus)
Yesterday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that while Russian athletes who are “considered clean” may compete at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, they will do so in neutral uniforms and under the moniker “Olympic Athlete from Russia” rather than as the Russian Olympic Team. The Russian national anthem wouldn’t be played if they win, although the team may be reinstated for the closing ceremonies.
That is a big step for the international sporting community in their task of dealing with Russia’s manipulation of the anti-doping system at the 2014 Olympics.
But significant as it may be, the drama is far from over as several more decisions must be taken. Individual athletes disqualified from the Olympics by an IOC Disciplinary Panel are appealing their bans to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), sport’s supreme court. Several of the provisions in the IOC’s Tuesday decision are also certain to be appealed to CAS, among them the assertion that no Russian athlete with a previous doping ban can compete in the 2018 Games.
Decisions must also be taken by individual international sports federations, like the International Ski Federation (FIS) and the International Biathlon Union (IBU). Russia has broken enough statutes of these federations that they may be suspended, which could have its own effects on the competitive field at the World Cup, the Olympics, and lower levels of competition.
And finally, there allegedly hundreds to thousands of doping cases indicated in digital forensic evidence from the Russia investigation which have not been dealt with yet because they do not involve athletes from the 2014 Olympics.
Sport Federation Statutes and Suspensions
The Russians celebrate a silver medal in the men’s 4 x 10 k cross-country skiing relay at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. After the disqualification of Alexander Legkov and Maxim Vylegzhanin, the team has been ordered to return the medals.
The 2014 FIS Anti-Doping Rules, which went into effect on January 1, 2014 (before the Olympics started that February), state that the federation can take action against national ski teams, such as barring athletes from competition or assessing fines, if there is evidence of extensive doping within the team.
Article 12.3.1 of the rules state that such action may be taken when “Four or more violations of these Anti-Doping Rules… are committed by Athletes or other Persons affiliated with a National Ski Association within a 12-month period in testing conducted by FIS or Anti-Doping Organisations…”
At the moment, eight Russian cross-country skiers have been disqualified by the International Olympic Committee for doping violations at the 2014 Olympics: Alexander Legkov, Evgeny Belov, Alexei Petukhov, Maxim Vylegzhanin, Julia Ivanova, Evgenia Shapovalova, Anastasia Dotsenko, and Julia Tchekaleva.
“In such event FIS may in its discretion elect to: (a) withdraw some or all FIS membership rights, including participation in all FIS calendar competitions, voting rights at the FIS Congress, ban all officials from that National Ski Association for participation in any FIS activities for a period of up to two years and/or (b) cancellation of the organisation of future FIS events in the disciplines concerned and/or (c) withdraw some or all FIS funding to the National Ski Association…” the rules state.
A second provision states that if four more cases are found within a 12-month period after the first four or more cases, “FIS may suspend that National Ski Association’s membership for a period of up to 4 years.”
The rules also stipulate that if “More than one Athlete or other Person from a National Ski Association commits an Anti-Doping Rule violation during an International Event… FIS may fine that National Ski Association in an amount up to CHF 50’000.–.”
FIS has yet to officially consider any of these actions, but they will likely be brought up for discussion soon.
Russian anchor Anton Shipulin celebrates his team’s gold medal in the men’s relay over Germany’s Simon Schempp. So far, no male biathletes from Russia have been implicated in the doping scandal.
In a statement released by U.S. Ski and Snowboad, CEO Tiger Shaw said, “On behalf of our athletes, we have a fundamental obligation to fight for fairness in sport, to advocate for the health and welfare of athletes and to protect the image of our sport. Now we look to the International Ski Federation (FIS) to hold a FIS Council meeting to review the IOC’s decision and related evidence to consider its impact on the Russian Ski Association, its FIS committee members, officials and athletes.”
Meanwhile, the IBU will hold an Executive Board meeting this weekend, in which it may address violations of its own statutes.
The IBU did not implement rules similar to the FIS rules regarding suspending member federations or canceling events on the basis of repeated doping offenses until its 2014 Congress, which was held after the Sochi Olympics. But Russia may have violated other IBU statutes.
In the 2012 IBU Rules, it is stated that “The IBU may impose a fine either by requesting payment or by withholding financial support from a member federation if more than one athlete or more than one person from such member federation commits a violation of the IBU Anti-Doping Rules during a 12-month period.”
In the same edition of the rules, a provision states that “IBU member federations that are full members may be suspended by the Executive Board, for up to two years, until the next IBU Congress if they do not fulfill their obligations stated in Art. 2.3.2.”
Among the “Obligations of Full Members” described in that article is, “to comply with the IBU Constitution and Rules.” Two of the “Objectives” listed in the IBU Consitution are “to prevent doping in biathlon” and “to prevent all methods and practices that might jeopardize the integrity of biathlon competitions.”
All of the athletes banned by the IOC, additionally, may see sanctions from their relevant international federations. The skiers and biathletes are currently under provisional suspensions from FIS and the IBU, and doping hearing panels will (eventually) consider the evidence against them and decide whether to bring anti-doping rule violations. The time frame for that is unclear.
Likely CAS Rulings
There are already 22 appeals registered at CAS by athletes who were disqualified from the 2014 Olympics by the IOC’s Disciplinary Commission.
Alexander Legkov is one of 22 Russian athletes appealing their disqualifications to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. (Photo: Marcel Hilger)
Thus it is likely, but not guaranteed, that the retroactive disqualification from the 2014 Games will remain standing.
(Then there’s the question of getting the medals back: biathlete Yana Romanova said that “I’d rather throw my medal in the dumpster, than return it to the IOC,” referring to the silver medal she was given in the women’s relay and was ordered to return after her disqualification.)
Besides disqualifying the atheltes from the 2014 Games, the IOC Disciplinary Commission decisions also banned them from all future Olympics. There is no provision for lifetime suspensions on a first doping offense in the World Anti-Doping Code, so this could be a real fight at the CAS level.
Similarly, the IOC’s Tuesday decision included a ruling that no Russian athlete who had ever been suspended for an Anti-Doping Rule Violation could compete in the 2018 Olympics. That is very unlikely to stand, as the Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled several times, in different specific circumstances, against past doping violations being used anew to bar athletes from competing in a new set of events.
Aside from the issue of double jeopardy, there would be an inherent unfairness to preventing Russian athletes who had completed doping suspensions from competing, while others who had served and completed similar suspensions were allowed to participate.
Athletes who may challenge this provision include cross-country skier Natalia Matveeva and biathlete Alexander Loginov, both of whom finished their suspensions for using EPO, and have since returned to competition.
In comparison, Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway and Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland have both served doping suspensions and will almost certainly be on the start line.
Outstanding Cases
Finally, there are many more cases that have not yet been handled.
The IOC has so far only suspended athletes involved in a doping cover-up scheme at the 2014 Olympics. But in the course of the investigation of that scheme, evidence came to light of many, many more cases outside of the Games.
Hours after this photo was taken and Alexander Legkov had won Olympic gold, Russian anti-doping head Grigory Rodchenov has said that he switched out Legkov’s anti-doping sample for a vial of clean urine collected previously. Legkov has been stripped of his gold medal and banned from all future Olympic Games.
In it: a description of how a second laboratory independently confirmed a finding from the McLaren Report that two of Legkov’s urine sample bottles from Sochi had been tampered with.
The decision also reveals that Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director who in truth managed a covert doping program before turning whistleblower, personally tested Legkov’s urine as part of a “washout scheme” to see how quickly drugs disappeared from his body.
Rodchenkov also said that he swapped out the urine sample collected after Legkov won a gold medal in the 50 k for a previously-collected clean sample.
However, Vilukhina won silver in the 7.5 k sprint, and this finding means that Ukraine’s Vita Semerenko stands to be upgraded from bronze to silver and Karin Oberhofer of Italy would become the new bronze medalist.
Vilukhina also finished seventh in the 10 k pursuit, 21st in the 15 k mass start, and contributed to Russia’s silver medal in the women’s relay, along with Romanova. That means that the Norwegian team of Fanny Horn Birkeland, Tiril Eckhoff, Ann Kristin Flatland, and Tora Berger would move from bronze to silver, and the Czech Republic’s Eva Puskarcikova, Gabriela Koukalova, Jitka Landova, and Veronica Vitkova should earn bronze.
Legkov has been anything but out of the news. He was targeting a comeback for the 2018 Olympics after sitting out last year with a provisional doping suspension. Legkov and five other skiers had been cleared to return to competition by the International Ski Federation (FIS) despite their IOC bans, with FIS saying that they had to read the IOC decisions in full before taking any action.
During that time, Evgeniy Belov finished sixth in the 15 k classic at the World Cup in Ruka, Finland, on Saturday, and 12th overall in the weekend-long minitour; Maxim Vylegzhanin was 16th in the classic and 20th overall; and Evgenia Shapovalova finished seventh in the women’s sprint and 54th in the minitour overall.
Alexey Petukhov did not compete on the World Cup and the last of the six athletes, Julia Ivanova, has retired.
Legkov did not compete on the World Cup either. Coach Marcus Cramer told Norwegian media outlet VG that after having his gold medal from the Olympic 50 k stripped, Legkov has become depressed and lost five kilograms.
It remains to be seen what FIS will do with the Legkov decision, and when the IOC will publish decisions for the other Russian skiers. All or none of those athletes may be back on the starting line in when the World Cup moves to Lillehammer, Norway, this coming weekend.
In the meantime, here are some key parts of the decision, which you can read in full here.
What proof is needed:
The panel noted that before the 2016 Summer Olympics, the IOC did not ban all Russian athletes but instead shifted the burden onto the athletes to prove that they were clean: “…. the IOC considered that the revelations of Prof. McLaren were so serious and so far-reaching that it was justified to establish a presumption that all top-level Russian athletes had been part of that system and that only the athletes who could rebut such a presumption would be accepted at the Games.”
The IOC panel did not want to do this for winter sports athletes, instead considering individual cases. But they also noted that finding proof of doping would not require a positive drug test, because by nature this scandal is about covering up positive tests and thus that evidence would have been destroyed.
“The evidence of a cover-up is typically either witness evidence or circumstantial evidence from which the application of the process can be inferred,” they wrote. “For the purpose of anti-doping proceedings, CAS jurisprudence has defined a specific standard, defined as ‘comfortable satisfaction of the hearing panel bearing in mind the seriousness of the allegation which has been made’,” they wrote.
Further down in the document, the panel noted that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS, mentioned above, and the Supreme Court equivalent in sports law) has already signaled that it would accept circumstantial evidence.
In another decision, CAS had written that “the combination and different type of facts provided by the Second [McLaren] IP report with respect to any individual athlete are circumstantial evidence that can be used to establish an [anti-doping rule violation.”
The Panel Trusts the McLaren Report, and Rodchenkov
While the panel did commission some of its own forensic analyses of urine sample bottles, it also relied on evidence gathered by Professor Richard McLaren for an Independent Person Report almost a year ago.
“The global evidence obtained by Prof. McLaren is very strong with regard to the existence of the scheme,” the panel wrote. “It allows a conclusion about the existence and implementation of the scheme in Sochi (and well beyond Sochi), which Prof. McLaren describes as ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The Disciplinary Commission can only agree with that conclusion.”
“The relevance of the elements related to individual athletes has to be considered from a different perspective,” the panel wrote, before concluding that “Prof. McLaren’s credibility is unquestionable.” His evidence would be used as part of a case against athletes, although not the only evidence.
The panel also said that they trusted Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow lab director who became a whistleblower. He has been the victim of character assassination by Russian interests, but the panel did not buy it.
“Dr. Rodchenkov was the main actor in the system and he is the best placed person to explain what it was,” they noted. “Dr. Rodchenkov is no longer in Russia and he is under the protection of the FBI. Therefore he is now free to speak openly…. His statements are very precise and clear. They are also very consistent and there are no contradictions between the various elements he describes… Every time other evidence has been available, the information provided by Dr. Rodchenkov has been systematically corroborated by such evidence.”
The Panel’s Own Forensic Analysis
The IOC commissioned a forensic analysis of urine sample bottles, to be done at the University of Lausanne. The McLaren Report had already done this task using a respected lab in London, but the panel called the Lausanne analysis “a more complete and thorough forensic analysis.”
It took Professor Christophe Champod, the leader of the analysis, two months to discover how sample bottles could be opened and closed. Like the London lab, he examined sample bottles for marks that would indicate that they had been opened using the method he had discovered – and he found bottles with these typical marks on them. Reportedly, examining each of the 232 sample bottles and 30 control bottles he was given took over an hour.
The panel was deliberate in emphasizing repeatedly how carefully Champod had done this work – perhaps because they had been criticized for allowing this aspect of the process to take so long and allow a situation where the provisional suspensions of Russian skiers were lifted by FIS.
“Prof. Champod appeared to be very knowledgeable and very cautious at the same time,” the panel wrote. “When not sure, he never hesitated to admit that he had no certainty. This gave a lot of credibility to the positions of which he claimed to be certain.”
As with the sample bottles the IOC also commissioned a “complete and thorough” investigation of salt levels in the sample bottles, another task which had also been done by the McLaren report. This analysis was done at the Lausanne University Hospital. The professor investigating the urine samples found that a number of samples had salt concentrations “definitively out of range and even out of renal physiological possibilities suggesting strongly a manipulation of the samples for example the addition of sodium chloride.”
Bad News About That
Overall, the panel had come to the conclusion that the sample manipulation and cover-up scheme existed, and that the only way for it to do so was for athletes to be involved. After all, the clean urine samples had to be obtained from somewhere.
“The Disciplinary Commission came to the conclusion that it was not possible that the athletes were not fully implicated… the scheme could not work without the personal implication of the athletes.”
Thus, if the athlete was mentioned in planning documents (called the “Duchess List” and the “Medals By Day List”), they more or less must have been in on the scheme, the panel wrote.
Legkov was on the Duchess List, and moreover, two of his sample bottles showed marks of being tampered with. These where the types of bottles that Prof. Champod was “certain” about.
Furthermore, in a written affidavit, Rodchenkov discussed Legkov specifically, saying that he had at some point checked urine samples provided by Legkov to make sure that the drugs had disappeared, or “washed out”. Washout tests are used to see how long drugs stay in an athlete’s body. This enables planned doping programs and ensures that athletes will not test positive if they are tested by a foreign antidoping agency. Such tests are prohibited by anti-doping rules.
Rodchenkov also said that he had discussed how Legkov was responding to the drugs he had been given – the answer was, he was responding well – and also that he had personally swapped the athletes urine samples in Sochi on the night after Legkov won his gold medal. The relevant sample, collected after that race, was one of the two sample bottles which showed marks consistent with tampering.
“Based on the above elements, the Disciplinary Commission has no hesitation to conclude that it is more than comfortably satisfied that the athlete was a participant in, and a beneficiary of, the cover up scheme implemented on the occasion of the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014.”
What Legkov Provided As Evidence
Legkov and his lawyer submitted affadavits from Elena Valbe, the president of the Russian Cross-Country Ski Federation, as well as from his coaches and team staff, stating that nobody knew he was providing clean urine for the sample-swapping scheme.
He also listed all of the anti-doping tests he had undergone, but the panel was not convinced.
“As regards the allegation that the athlete could not have used the Duchess Cocktail because of the intensity of testing he was subject to, the Disciplinary Commission remarks that the history of doping is full of highly controlled athletes, who never tested positive, until they finally had to admit that they had been doping over a long period of time,” the panel wrote.
And, Legkov pointed out contradictions and seeming errors in some of the McLaren Report evidence. Again, the panel did not agree with Legkov’s assertions.
“The Athlete has sought to challenge each individual piece of evidence, but when all the pieces match and comfort each other, no doubt is possible.”
A Bizarre Squabble Over DNA
Legkov and his lawyer wanted the samples assumed to be his, to be DNA tested to make sure that his urine was inside them. This was mistakenly assumed to have been done in the McLaren Report, but it turned out that only some of the Sochi samples had been analyzed in this way. Thus, late in the hearing process, Legkov requested that the IOC get a DNA sample from him, and see if the urine samples matched.
The implication was that if they did not match, then he would not have been the one providing the “clean urine” to swap out, and thus would not be implicated in the scheme.
This led, however, to a game of chicken. Legkov was training in Italy at the time. The IOC requested he come to Lausanne to have the DNA sample collected. Legkov insisted that the IOC come to Italy. The IOC offered to have a car sent to Italy to pick him up, bring him to Lausanne, and then return him, saying that it was necessary to come to Switzerland “for the collection of a reference sample under adequate conditions to avoid the risk of contamination by foreign DNA.”
In the end, no agreement could be reached, and Legkov’s DNA was never collected or matched to the urine in the sample bottles.
The IOC did not see this as a barrier to their conclusions: for the subset of samples which had been DNA-tested in the McLaren Report, all those belonging to athletes on the Duchess List turned out to match the DNA in the sample bottles.
For two female hockey players, DNA did not match. But the reasoning by the investigators was that these athletes were not on the Duchess List and had been added into the doping scheme at the last minute, so they took the drugs but had not provided clean urine and thus their samples had to be swapped out with someone else’s urine.
Five members of Cross Country Canada’s 2014 Olympic team get the perfect photo opp at the Olympic rings in Krasnaya Polyana, Russia. (From left to right) Perianne Jones, Amanda Ammar, Heidi Widmer, Brittany Webster, and Emily Nishikawa. (Photo: Emily Nishikawa)
On Nov. 9, news broke that four more Russian cross-country skiers had been sanctioned for cheating during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. So far, six Russian nordic athletes in total have had their 2014 Olympic results erased by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). These athletes are also prohibited from participating in all future Olympics due to their affiliation with Russia’s elaborate-state sanctioned doping enterprise.
Julia Ivanova, half of Russia’s 2014 Olympic team-sprint duo, is one of the six penalized Russians. In Sochi, Ivanova and her teammate Anastasia Dotsenko skied to 10th place in the classic team sprint. (Thus far, Dotsenko has not been implicated in the doping scheme.)
Russia’s Julia Ivanova racing at 2012 World Cup Finals in Falun, Sweden.
It’d be easy to say the Russian pair was way out of the medals — theirs was simply another tainted performance already removed from the official results.
Yet among those clean athletes caught up in the win-at-all-costs mantra of the Sochi doping regime are Canada’s team-sprint pair Perianne Jones, now 32, and Dasha Gaiazova Atkins, 33. Looking back, “What might of been?” is a legitimate question the two retired skiers have asked.
Ivanova and Dotsenko made the Sochi team-sprint final as what’s referred to as lucky losers — 10th place in their semifinal wasn’t enough for them to automatically advance but their time was fast enough relative to the rest of the field to put them through to the final. Jones and Gaiazova Atkins were right behind them in 11th, which was the end of their day.
“I texted Peri that morning when the article came out in Fasterskier and said, ‘Should we start training for a redo?’ ” Gaiazova Atkins, who was born in Russia but spent more than half of her life in Canada, said on the phone from her home in Calgary. “Because we could have been in the finals and then you never know how that goes. It could have had a much, much better result and we could have had a chance for a medal.”
One year before the 2014 Olympics, at the pre-Olympic World Cup in Sochi, Jones and Gaiazova (the latter of which has been married since, hence the new last name) placed third in the classic team sprint. Notably, they were third in a photo finish with the second-place Russians — Ivanova teamed up with Natalia Matveeva in that race.
Canada’s Perianne Jones (l) and Dasha Gaiazova having some fun after notching their first podium together with bronze in the classic team sprint at the Sochi pre-Olympic World Cup in February 2013. (Photo: Chandra Crawford)
Jones first heard about the Ivanova news through Gaiazova Atkins’s text message.
“When it goes back and you realize that something could have gone a little bit differently or wonder what could’ve been, then you think about it a lot more and it definitely hits you a little personally,” Jones said on the phone from Canmore, Alberta. “For sure, it makes me feel sick and I cannot go back. No one can. That’s the unfair part. … It’s an interesting conundrum: people have put their lives into something and then are not given a fair chance.”
The “what if” part of this story is multi-layered. Ivanova raced twice in the 2014 Olympics before the team sprint; first in the 10-kilometer classic on Feb. 13 and again in the 4 x 5 k relay on Feb. 15. What if Ivanova had been tested after those races and a legit lab had found her to be doped? What if Ivanova and Dotsenko never raced the team sprint on Feb. 19? Or a different iteration of Russians were slower in the semis? On paper at least, in this post-Sochi thought experiment, the Canadians advance to the final as lucky losers.
The perspective of time buffered by athletic retirement seemed to have taken the edge off the tone of both Jones and Gaiazova Atkins, based on their voices over the phone. They both sounded calm and measured, without a sense of bitterness. But they raised several important points as the fallout from the Russia’s doping program continues.
Canada’s Perianne Jones racing to fifth in the 1.4 k classic sprint at 2015 World Championships in Falun, Sweden. She placed 24th overall and retired after that 2014/2015 season.(Photo: Flyingpointroad.com)
On Jones’s mind were those athletes still competing, and those wondering if they, too, are racing in an unlevel playing field.
“I am retired now,” Jones said. “So it would have been tough had all this stuff been coming out as I was still ski racing. I think it is tough for the athletes who are still competing now. Not that it is easy to hear about it after the fact, but you definitely have to believe you can do it while you are ski racing. I imagine that at least most of the playing field is clean and that would be hard given everything that has transpired over the last little while.”
Gaiazova Atkins’s story resonates due to her literal mid-teen continental shift. At the age of 15, she moved with her family from Russia to Quebec. Although she started skiing in Russia, her swift trajectory up into the international ranks began as a Canadian. She did, however, recall a Russian ski culture where more than a healthy lifestyle choice was on the line.
“I would say there is more pressure in Russia,” Gaiazova Atkins said. “And maybe because in Russia, in so many ways the country is so far behind in development … they have very few resources. So there is a lot of pressure to become a big skier because if you can race fast, you can do quite well for yourself in the country. … In America, it is not the same. And here in Canada, Chandra [Crawford] got a gold medal, shake her hand and off she goes to get an education.”
Gaiazova Atkins’s perspective was one of trying to humanizing cheaters and would-be cheats, people with families and their own demons straddling their shoulders.
“The incentive to perform is so much higher in Russia,” Gaiazova Atkins said. “And the alternative? You can live in poverty and then, OK, I am going to take a chance. So for a lot of athletes, it may not be perceived as high risk because it’s the only chance to do well in life.”
While she expressed that blame should be placed on those involved, Gaiazova Atkins emphasized truly understanding an athlete’s complicity.
“I know these girls and I know the guys who are now being stripped of their results,” she said. “I follow them on Instagram and I see what they are saying in Russian, and it’s crazy they are still denying they did this. But then, you think about a big country like Russia and the whole thing, you almost ask yourself, ‘Did the athletes even know this was happening? Did they have any say?’ It is just like, you have no choice as an athlete.”
Dasha Gaiazova racing to 44th in the women’s 10 k classic individual start at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. She retired at the end of that 2013/2014 season and is currently coaching the Space Dogs Ski Club (where she’s also the president) in Calgary.
Several times, Gaiazova Atkins stated her belief that the doping was a top-down mandate, a state-sanctioned endeavor with upper-government power plays manifesting with Sochi podiums. But she’s also no apologist.
“I follow on Instagram and their posts from all those guys, like Legkov and people that support him,” she said. “They say, we are with [Legkov] because we know how hard he works and how much work ethic he has. And I am thinking to myself, every single person racing is working just as hard and harder.
“I feel sorry for those athletes, especially those who aren’t as systematic like the state-supervised program,” she added. “The ones who choose themselves and go to doctors, no pity for you.”
As far as moving forward, Gaiazova Atkins said she was in favor of nothing less than a wholesale Russian ban from the upcoming PyeongChang Games.
“You cannot slap them on the hand and say, ‘OK, don’t do this next time, please’,” she said. “It has to be with consequences for the state, for the country.”
Gaiazova Atkins also believes that Ivanova’s doping has had lasting impact on potential funding for the current crop of Canadian cross-country skiers. “Eleventh place is not a top 10,” she said.
“Cross Country Canada funding is based on our results, and there is a big difference between a top 10 and 11th place sometimes,” she added. “To take us out of the equation, this had a trickle effect on the whole system, like our whole nation may have been affected by the funding because we did not get a top-10 result.”
As the concentric ripples from Russian doping in Sochi move outward, they’ve arrived in North America, nearly four years late, with the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, on the horizon.
Canadians Perianne Jones and Dasha Gaiazova celebrate their first bronze together in the 2013 Sochi World Cup classic team sprint. (Photo: Chandra Crawford)
Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla.
For the second day in a row, Charlotte Kalla, a name synonymous with the yellow and blue of Sweden, stood atop the podium, placing first in the women’s 10-kilometer classic International Ski Federation (FIS) race on Saturday in Gällivare, Sweden. On Friday, Kalla won another individual-start race, the 5 k freestyle, by a margin of 8.8 seconds. She more than doubled that time gap by the finish of Day 2, winning the 10 k classic in 27:55 minutes, 17.7 seconds ahead of Russia’s Yulia Tchekaleva in second place. Natalia Nepryaeva, also from Russia, skied to third, 40.9 seconds back of Kalla.
“I am feeling good and I think I am where I should be at this moment,” Kalla wrote in an email. “I had a good feeling on the classic race and handle the condition well. On Friday I opened hard and tried to push hard all the way.”
Known as a skate powerhouse, Kalla has improved her classic skiing and is now a double threat. “I have improved my classic technique the last years,” Kalla explained. “When I am in shape it doesn’t matter if it is skating or classic. I am glad I managed to ski well in the condition we had. It was a little bit soft because of the snowfall.”
Although a home FIS event for Sweden, Russia secured six of the top-10 spots with Sweden settling for three. Japan’s Masako Ishida, the only non-Russian or Swede outlier in the top 10, placed fourth (+1:02.4). Russians Anna Zherebyateva raced to fifth (+1:08.8) while teammate Yulia Belorukova was sixth (+1:12.8).
Sweden took the next two spots with Stina Nilsson in seventh (+1:20.9) and Anna Haag in eighth (1:20.9). Russia rounded out the top 10 with Anatasia Sedova placing ninth (+1:24.1) and Mariya Guschina in tenth (+1:25.0).
Sweden’s Ida Ingemarsdotter, a World Cup regular, placed 11th (+1:30.6).
Kikkan Randall was the only U.S. Ski Team member at the race, and a day after finishing eighth in the 5 k skate, she finished 15th (+1:48.1) on Saturday. In an email, Randall explained that snow had fallen continuously for the last 24 hours in Gällivare.
“Conditions were pretty nice, the track was a little soft and a lot of racers here made the pole track a little punchy,” she wrote.
Considering the massive time-zone shift from her home in Anchorage, Alaska, to Central European Time, it appears Randall is adjusting well.
“I felt decent today, not too tired from the jet lag or yesterday’s race. I wanted two back-to-back races to get ready for next weekend’s triple World Cup opener,” she wrote, referring to the first three World Cup races in Kuusamo, Finland, starting Friday, Nov. 23.
Throughout Saturday’s 10 k, Randall steadily improved her overall placing: she was 32nd at 4.2 k, 23rd at 6.8 k and locked into 15th by 9.2 k.
“It was definitely good to race a 10km classic today,” Randall wrote. “I had trouble really digging into my race gear on the first lap today. I think I was skiing a little stiff and not carrying my momentum down the track. Nepryaeva [the third-place finisher] caught me going into the 2nd lap and that was the jumpstart I needed. I was able to match her pace for most of the rest of the race and it helped me find better technique and tempo.
“I wanted to be a little stronger today but I got some really important feedback on where I’m at and what I need to work on as the race season progresses,” she added. “My fitness feels pretty good and now it’s just a matter of fine-tuning.”
Emily Nishikawa was the only Canadian entered on Saturday and finished in 51st (+3:39.3). Sixty-nine women started the race, 38 from Sweden, 17 from Russia, seven from Japan, two from Switzerland and Estonia, and one each from the U.S., Canada, and Poland.
In Friday’s 10 k skate in Gällivare, only Swiss star Dario Cologna kept the Russians from sweeping the top nine by placing third. In that race, Evgeniy Belov and Sergey Ustiugov of the Russian national team finished first and second, respectively.
Saturday was a different race, a 15 k classic, but with a similar thread and no Cologna as a Russian foil.
The Russian men finishing in unison to take first, second and third in the men’s 30 k skiathlon, the final race of 2017 U23 World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. Alexander Bolshunov (8) was deemed the winner, Alexey Chervotkin (1) was second, and Denis Spitsov (11) third. (Photo: FlyingPointRoad.com)
It was Russia, Russia, Russia.
Alexander Bolshunov, winner of the 30 k skiathlon at 2017 U23 World Championships, won the race in 37:13, one second ahead of Maxim Vylegzhanin in second. Alexey Chervotkin was third (+5.1).
Classic specialist, Kazakhstan’s Alexey Poltoranin finished fourth, 13 seconds off the podium, and Cologna placed fifth (+22.1).
Despite being on Swedish soil, the rest of the top 10 became a mostly Russian affair. Russian teammates Alexey Vitsenko and Artem Maltsev placed sixth (+29.5) and seventh (+37.4), respectively, Sweden’s Calle Halfvarsson interrupted the trend by tying Russia’s Evgeniy Belov for eighth (+38.0), and Russia’s Alexander Bessmertnykh took 10th (+40.1).
There’s a pattern: Russia took 14 of the top-20 places. Twenty-eight of 126 starters were from Russia, with the vast majority of the field being Swedish. Outside of the top 10, Sweden’s Daniel Rickardsson was the next-best Swede in 12th (+49.6).
Devon Kershaw (World Cup Team), who finished 12th on Friday, once again led Canada in 20th (+1:06.7). At 6.8 k, Kershaw was ranked 15th, and at 9.6 k he was down one spot to 16th. By the 11.4 k checkpoint, he began slipping further in the standings.
“Today was a tough one,” Kershaw wrote in an email. “I felt pretty good but conditions were soft, so you had to really feather it (the technique) – especially on the climbs. Pacing wise I think I was doing pretty well, but in the last 2.5km today I was missing any semblance of a kick to the finish and ended up conceding a few seconds to those around me, knocking me from about 15-16 to 20th.”
Although an interval start race, Kershaw never found a strong pacing partner. “I was skiing alone – no help at all today,” Kershaw wrote of his solitary effort. “It would have been so helpful! Especially that last lap when things get tough. But in individual start races, you need to learn to do it alone. So good to try and get used to that “time trial” feeling.”
Three other Canadians competed, with Graeme Killick (World Cup Team) finishing 50th (+2:32.3), Jack Carlyle (Alberta World Cup Academy) 91st (+4:06.1), and Brian McKeever (Para Nordic Team) 110th (+5:16.0).
As of press time, Fasterskier could not confirm if the International Ski Federation (FIS) held an emergency meeting to discuss the involvement of IOC-banned Russian skiers in FIS-sanctioned races. Of the six IOC-sanctioned Russian skiers, four are men: Belov, Vylegzhanin, Alexander Legkov, and Alexey Petukhov. All four skiers raced on Friday, however, Legkov and Petukhov (and Shapovalova, one of the two women sanctioned by the IOC) did not contest Saturday’s race.
Racing continues in Gällivare on Sunday with classic sprints.
Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla racing to a win in her first race of the 2017/2018 season, the women’s 5 k freestyle in Gällivare, Sweden, on Friday. (Photo: Sporteventgallivare/Instagram)
Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla and Hanna Falk went 1-2 in Sweden’s season-opening International Ski Federation (FIS) race on Friday in Gällivare, with Kalla winning the women’s 5-kilometer freestyle by 8.8 seconds in 12:58.1 minutes. Falk, her teammate on the Swedish women’s team, placed second and Russia’s Yulia Belorukova took the third spot on the podium, 10.3 seconds out of first.
The host nation had three in the top four, with Ida Ingemarsdotter in fourth (+16.1). Switzerland’s Nathalie von Siebenthal finished fifth (+17.8), Russia’s Yulia Tchekaleva placed sixth (+23.4), and Russia’s Natalia Nepryaeva was seventh (+25.0).
Kikkan Randall of the U.S. Ski Team raced to eighth (+27.2), just ahead of Sweden’s Evelina Settlin in ninth (+32.0) and Russia’s Anna Nechaevskaya in 10th (+33.5). Japan’s Masako Ishida was just 0.3 seconds out of the top 10 in 11th.
In an email, Randall explained that she decided to venture to Europe earlier this year to get some racing in ahead of the World Cup.
“We also wanted a little extra time to let Breck adjust to the 10hr time change!” she wrote of her 1-year-old son, who will be traveling the World Cup circuit with Randall and her husband, Jeff Ellis, this winter.
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Most of the U.S. Ski Team arrived in Rovaniemi, Finland, on Thursday, Nov. 16 (with the exception of Andy Newell, who is racing this weekend in Beitostølen, Norway, with Noah Hoffman). The rest of her teammates planned to train at the Santasport Olympic training center in Rovaniemi until Nov. 21, when the entire team will meet up in Kuusamo (also known as Ruka), Finland — the site of next weekend’s World Cup opener.
“I’m happy with my start today,” Randall wrote of Friday’s race. “It took my a couple km’s to get going today but I felt like I was finding my rhythm in the 2nd half of the course. It’s my first hard session this week after the travel over so today was a good jolt! It was a competitive field and I was satisfied to be in the mix.”
Ninety-two women raced the Gällivare 5 k skate, compared to 56 women on Friday in Beitostølen (Norway’s FIS season-opener). Randall planned to race the 10 k classic on Saturday in Gällivare, then skip Sunday’s classic sprint.
“It’s great to be back around other World Cup skiers again and I’ve always liked Gällivare so it’s nice to be back here,” she wrote. “My former wax tech lives here and has been taking great care of us. … Looking forward to meeting up with the team in Ruka next week.”
With 46 Swedes and 23 Russians accounting for most of the women’s field, Canada’s Emily Nishikawa put herself in the mix in 26th, 54.9 seconds behind Kalla. Nishikawa’s Canadian World Cup teammate Dahria Beatty placed 56th (+1:38.3).
For Nishikawa, who’s known as a distance skier, the top-30 result was notable in that a 5 k falls somewhere between a sprint and a distance race.
“5km is such a hard distance, and it is over so fast, but it is a lot of fun,” Nishikawa wrote in an email. “I have been able to work on my sprinting a bit more this summer as I have been injury free, so I’m looking forward to seeing more speed in my racing this season.”
She planned to race all three days in Gällivare, including Sunday’s sprint.
“With these races, I am just hoping to fine tune my fitness and get some hard intensity in to feel sharp for the upcoming World Cup races,” added Nishikawa, who’s entering her fifth World Cup season as a leading member of the Canadian women’s World Cup Team. “Today’s race was a really hard effort and I am happy with how I skied today.”
In the men’s 10 k freestyle on Friday, another one of the Russians sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Evgeniy Belov won in 23:08.5. He was 6.5 seconds faster than his Russian teammate Sergey Ustiugov, who placed second. Ustiugov is the defending Tour de Ski champion and Overall World Cup runner-up.
Switzerland’s Dario Cologna placed third, 7.6 seconds out of first, and Russia swept fourth through ninth, with Sweden’s Marcus Hellner following in 10th (+36.4). Out of the five actively competing skiers the IOC sanctioned earlier this month, all five raced on Friday in Gällivare, which was legal considering FIS had not ruled they can’t.
Four of those skiers are men. In addition to Belov, Maxim Vylegzhanin placed 14th (+43.2), Alexander Legkov followed in 15th (+45.9) and Alexey Petukhov finished 23rd (+56.7) out of 157 finishers on Friday.
Devon Kershaw (front) training with U.S. Ski Team sprinter Andy Newell in Sjusjøen, Norway, last week. (Photo: Noah Hoffman)
Ahead of them, Canada’s Devon Kershaw ended up 12th (+39.9), tying another Russian Artem Maltsev (who is not on the IOC-banned list) with identical times.
“My stance on the whole Russian fiasco is unchanged,” Kershaw wrote in an email, referring to a previous email he wrote to FasterSkier earlier this week when asked how he felt about the IOC-banned Russians competing in FIS events. “I find the entire thing both disturbing and hilarious. The fact that FIS is risking their credibility like this makes no sense to me. Apparently there will be an emergency meeting of sorts tomorrow about it (with FIS I’m assuming but I haven’t heard much about it) – so we’ll have to all wait and see what they come up with.
“As for seeing Belov win – I mean, that’s no surprise,” Kershaw continued. “He’s shown that he’s a force when he’s in form. But yeah, the fact that he and others have been recently banned for life by the IOC are winning races after that news came out just shows the Mickey Mouse club that our sport has become.”
As for his own race, Kershaw wrote that he felt great about it. The course suited him well without too much hard climbing. “… You kind of need to be pushing the whole way around. I really like courses like that,” he wrote.
The conditions, however, with about 10 to 15 centimeters of new snow from the early morning that continued into the race, made the course slower, which Kershaw found to be more challenging.
“But that is another reason why I am so satisfied with the effort today. Individual start skating in soft conditions? Not my favourite, so I’m happy how I was able to execute things,” he wrote. “For me to be in the mix in a 10km skate like that feels great. I had good energy all race and hit my technical goals for the race too, so I have to be satisfied.”
Kershaw and the rest of Canada’s Period 1 World Cup team arrived in Gällivare last Sunday. Over the last week, they’ve been testing equipment and getting into a race routine ahead of the World Cup opener, he explained.
“I changed various things with my training this year so it’s exciting to see how my body feels in the beginning of a new season,” Kershaw wrote. “… My goals are really to just be calm and execute well – which means going into the racing with no expectations other than to ski as technically well as possible while working on the whole pacing thing (which can be challenging at the beginning of the season when you don’t have that many races in the body). I’ll look to have another well executed race tomorrow and the results will be what they will be.”
Canada’s NorAm leader at the end of last season, Russell Kennedy (Team R.A.D.) was the next-best Canadian in 48th (+1:35.7), followed by Len Valjas (World Cup Team) in 49th (+1:37.0). Jack Carlyle (Alberta World Cup Academy) placed 67th (+2:07.2), Julien Locke (National U25 Team) was 72nd (+2:10.9), Graeme Killick (World Cup Team) 90th (+2:32.2), Brian McKeever (Para Nordic Team) 97th (+2:39.0), and Jess Cockney (World Cup Team) 119th (+3:10.7). Knute Johnsgaard (World Cup Team) did not start.
Racing continues in Gällivare this weekend with 10/15 k classic individual starts on Saturday followed by classic sprints on Sunday.
Maxim Vylegzhanin competing in the 10 k classic in Falun, Sweden, in 2016. Vylegzhanin has been banned by the International Olympic Committee for doping at the 2014 Olympics, but is currently free to compete in other ski races, and collected two top-six finishes in Muonio, Finland, this weekend. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
Note: On. Nov. 23, the day before the first World Cup race of the season, the FIS Doping Panel released a statement regarding the FIS eligibility of the six Russian skiers specified in the following article.
In the last two weeks, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has disqualified six Russian cross-country skiers from the 2014 Olympics and barred them from ever competing in a Games again.
This weekend, one of them – Maxim Vylegzhanin – was competing in pre-World Cup races in Muonio, Finland, where he collected fifth- and sixth-place finishes.
That is because although the athletes were banned by the IOC, the International Ski Federation (FIS) has not made any changes to the athletes’ status.
“It’s troubling that certain athletes are now banned from ever competing in IOC events in the future, yet are seemingly allowed to compete on the FIS circuit unimpeded,” Canadian Olympian Devon Kershaw wrote in an email (which is printed in full at the end of this piece). “I feel this is unprecedented. Talk about confusing. The Olympics themselves are FIS sanctioned races.”
Vylegzhanin isn’t banned by FIS, and so he’s not breaking any rules by racing in non-Olympic competitions. Likewise, Alexander Legkov, also banned by the IOC but not by FIS, will race in Gällivare, Sweden, this weekend, along with three other athletes in the same situation.
“I’m not ashamed to look into the eyes of athletes, going to the start line, I did not break any rules and my conscience is clear!” Vylegzhanin wrote in an Instagram post.
“We can not comment on it,” Gällivare organizing committee member Stefan Nieminen told Sweden’s SVT broadcaster. “They are free to compete, it is not our decision or our problem to handle that issue.”
It has led to something of a delicate balancing act for his competitors, many of whom have competed next to these athletes on the World Cup for years.
“What I mean when I say it’s not personal is I don’t feel like we need to take the punishment into our own hands and ostracize him on the World Cup or anything like that,” American skier Noah Hoffman said, when asked specifically about Vylegzhanin. “I want to see FIS take action. I don’t want to see extrajudicial action in the sense that it’s not overseen by the organizations that oversee the sport. I want to see the organizations that oversee the sport take adequate action.”
How Did We Get Here?
Previously, the six skiers had been provisionally suspended while investigations into systematic doping by Russia at the 2014 Olympics were ongoing. The athletes appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and FIS was given until Oct. 31 of this year to bring a case against the six, or else let their suspensions lapse – in effect, the athletes couldn’t be held in limbo forever.
Oct. 31 came and went, and the IOC’s Disciplinary Commission ruled against the athletes in early November (Nov. 1 for Alexander Legkov and Evgeniy Belov, and Nov. 9 for Vylegzhanin, Alexey Petukhov, Julia Ivanova, and Evgenia Shapovalova).
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Maxim Vylegzhanin (second from left) and Alexander Legkov (right) have both been banned by the International Olympic Committee for doping, but will be competing in Sweden this weekend.
Despite the change in the athletes’ status, FIS says that this does not constitute new evidence that would justify further provisional suspensions or an anti-doping rules violation (ADRV).
“The FIS Doping Panel is obliged to wait until the reasoned decisions are provided by the IOC Disciplinary Commission before it can undertake further action,” FIS Anti-Doping Administrator Sarah Fussek wrote in an email to FasterSkier. “This is a consequence of the CAS decision that the provisional sanctions of the Russian cross-country athletes would expire on 31st October and can only be reinstated if there was more specific evidence of individual anti-doping rule violations.”
In the CAS press release announcing the Oct. 31 deadline for FIS to bring a case against the skiers, the court only wrote that “a further provisional suspension may be imposed on the athletes by the International Ski Federation (FIS) after that date, if the facts and circumstances so merit, and would be subject to appeal.” No further specification was made in terms of what type of evidence would be required to impose another provisional suspension.
Fussek wrote that the IOC sanction on the athletes did represent a change in circumstance, but that it was not enough to impose a suspension.
“The fact that the IOC banned Russian athletes constitutes a change of the status of these athletes,” she wrote. “The IOC decision is a consequence of the assessment of the available evidence by the IOC Disciplinary Commission but does not by itself justify the imposition of a new provisional suspension by the FIS Doping Panel (FDP). The decision of the IOC DC is subject to appeal to the CAS. Before the FDP will independently review the matter of another provisional suspension (or a decision on the merits), it must know and examine the reasons on which the IOC DC based its decision.”
However, Fussek confirmed that both she and Stephan Netzle, FIS’s Legal Counsel, were present at the IOC Disciplinary Commission’s hearings for the athletes.
According to Russian Cross-Country Ski Federation President Elena Valbe, the hearing took ten hours. In the press, Valbe said that a commission from the University of Lausanne discussed finding scratch marks on sample bottles used for anti-doping work at the 2014 Olympics, saying that “they found that there were [marks] from specific people, some of our athletes had it… today there were results on salt [in the urine sample] of Julia Ivanova… there is a salt excess, it’s unclear how it got there, it’s all amazing.”
While FIS had representatives at the same hearing that Valbe discussed, they are awaiting the “reasoned decision”, a longer, written explanation, before acting.
“The FIS Doping Panel will afford the athletes the right of due process to examine the reasoned decision of the IOC before it will proceed,” Fussek wrote. “Until then, the Russian athletes, who are subject to a very rigid and tight doping control regime, will be admitted to competitions.”
In a follow-up email, she explained that Legkov had been tested 10 times by FIS in 2016-2017; Belov 12 times; Petukhov six times; Vylegzhanin 13 times; and Shapovalova nine times. Ivanova has retired and is out of the testing pool.
Athlete Reactions
Several athletes told FasterSkier that the Olympics is the biggest sporting event in the world, and it was most important to them that athletes who had cheated at past Games be excluded from the Olympics.
Canada’s Alex Harvey skating his way to a bronze medal in the 30 k skiathlon at World Championships in Falun, Sweden, in 2015. He is followed by Evgeny Belov of Russia, who is currently banned by the IOC for doping. (Photo: FlyingPointRoad)
“My view is that you have to pick your battles,” Alex Harvey, the Canadian who won World Championships gold in the 50-kilometer mass start last season, wrote in an email. “And this year the big battle is the Olympics, and I’m glad that the IOC was strong enough against doping to ban these six Russians from the Olympics, so there’s that battle.”
“I think the most important thing is the Olympic sanctions because the Olympics are so much more important than anything else,” American 2014 Olympian Hoffman said.
But from there, their views diverged.
Harvey believed that FIS had not found enough evidence to ban the athletes, despite their IOC bans.
“I feel like I have a decent understanding of the law since I’m six courses away from finishing my law degree, and I read the CAS judgement that said FIS couldn’t extend the temporary ban on those six Russians unless they came up with additional evidence, which, so far, didn’t happen,” he wrote. “I think it’s important to understand that this is a precedent that the IOC (and FIS for the temporary ban they gave those six Russians last winter) is/are setting. Never before in our sport have we seen athletes get a doping ban from an infraction other than a positive test, even though there are more ways to ban an athlete than just a positive test.”
Hoffman, however, didn’t understand why evidence that was sufficient for a ban by the IOC would not lead to a ban by FIS.
“The answer I want from FIS is, why does the IOC have enough evidence and FIS does not?” he asked. “Where is the disconnect coming from? And I don’t know the answer to that… I believe in a punishment that fits the crime, but that’s a punishment from every organization involved, not just the IOC. I’m glad the IOC is taking action because I believe it’s necessary to ensure clean sport in the future and that’s the most important thing, right? We can’t change the past, but we want to ensure clean sport in the future.”
Hoffman said repeatedly that for him, the issue of whether the Russian athletes should compete or not was “not personal.”
“How will I feel about racing against Vylegzhanin, for instance, on the World Cup this year?” he asked. “The answer is, for me as an athlete, I’m still just focused on what I can control and what I’m doing, and he’s just one more person within the field and I know the World Cup field is going to be strong… But then it does get personal when you look at last year. I missed the objective criteria for the U.S. Ski Team by one point and one place [on the World Cup distance list], and three places ahead of me was Legkov. Individual spots and individual points do matter, but I’m just focusing on what I can control.”
When asked about FIS’s handling of the situation, U.S. skier Kikkan Randall, who was formerly the FIS Athlete Representative for cross-country skiing, wrote, “I’m not the Athlete Rep any more so it’s not my place to comment on this. I’m also about ready to start racing and that’s where my focus is.”
Kershaw’s Take
When contacted about competing against Vylegzhanin, Canada’s Devon Kershaw wrote the following response.
Devon Kershaw training with American sprinter Andy Newell in Sjusjøen, Norway, last week. (Photo: Noah Hoffman)
“The entire situation regarding this scandal is flabbergastingly odd. The findings in the three major ‘investigative reports,’ with Parts #1 and #2 of the McLaren report issued by [the World Anti-Doping Agency], and then the Oswald commission by the IOC, have caused a maelstrom in the cross country ski world. With good measure to be sure, but at the same time the dysfunction that this situation has unveiled is troubling.
“’The Russians athletes, who are subject to a very rigid and tight doping control regime…’ is a cute response from FIS. Lance Armstrong was also subject to a rigid and tight doping control regime, and never officially failed a test while he was an active athlete, and yet…
“The list of cyclists that are ‘subject to a tight doping control regime’ is long. But so too is the list of athletes like David Millar or Thomas Dekker, who also didn’t fail a test, getting banned. I know, they found actual EPO in David Millar’s apartment in France during a raid, and Thomas Dekker was one of the earliest athletes to be caught with the ‘biological passport’ but the facts remain that both they and others – Did. Not. Fail. An. Antidoping. Test.
“And may I ask who is supposedly overseeing the ‘doping control system?’ Researching and publishing the list of banned substances for example, or in charge of the whereabouts systems in place? WADA? And didn’t WADA publish two explosive reports laying out some pretty troubling findings?
“What is going on? That’s my question for FIS. It’s troubling.
“Troubling in the fact that certain athletes are now banned from ever competing in IOC events in the future, yet are seemingly allowed to compete on the FIS circuit unimpeded. I feel this is unprecedented. Talk about confusing. The Olympics themselves are FIS sanctioned races, haha.
“I wish that with all these competing governing bodies with stakes in this (IOC, WADA, FIS) could come to a consensus and do it soon. The image and integrity of our sport could be likened to that of a dumpster fire; raging with the sickly stench of incompetence. Fans, athletes, staff, sponsors, all are left scratching their heads going ‘is this shit for real?’ and trying to understand how athletes can be banned, have their medals stripped for breaking doping rules and yet also be free to compete because ‘they are subject to a very rigid and tight doping control regime.’ I just cannot see something like this happening in other sports that have had similar issues (cycling comes to mind, or track and field for example).
“Am I happy to compete against the IOC banned Russians? Is it bad to say I don’t really care? I mean, me personally, as an aging athlete that week-in, week-out has been fighting between 10th and 85th in World Cups of late, I don’t exactly have a whole lot of clout. Caring changes nothing. BUT – what I would like to see is some continuity and clarity. That – or I’d like to see major funding partners leave FIS. Because at the end of the day, money talks. Cross country skiing is a tiny sport globally. Is this really what FIS wants the story to be? Apparently they don’t really care or are paralyzed at the moment, but maybe if their TV contracts, sponsors, etc., started asking the same questions WADA and the IOC are asking (by threatening to pull funding), perhaps we could get a clear answer out of FIS with this. Something grandiose seemingly needs to happen before change occurs. If not, this will be the story our sport carries at the forefront of the ‘biggest show on earth’ come February in Korea.
“And that would be sad, because there are a lot of beautiful stories that will be lost along the way. Stories that could help and inspire others.
“What I do care about is the sport of cross-country skiing. I believe unequivocally in the importance of clean sport. I want to see our sport thrive and succeed. This mess needs to be straightened out. I call upon those with the means and the information to please get to the bottom of this before our tiny sport becomes damaged further. It shouldn’t be this difficult and opaque.”
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Legkov (right) was sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee for doping, and as a result the Russian team’s relay result will be invalidated.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ruled that Russian cross-country skiers Alexander Legkov and Evgeniy Belov doped at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
As a result, Legkov’s gold medal in the 50-kilometer freestyle mass start, the Russian men’s silver medal in the 4 x 10 k relay, and Legkov’s 10th-place finish in the 30 k skiathlon are all invalidated, as are Belov’s 18th-place finish in the skiathlon and his 25th-place result in the 15 k classic.
The ruling states that Legkov must return his medals.
Significantly, the two athletes are also “declared ineligible to be accredited in any capacity for all editions of the Games of the Olympiad and the Olympic Winter Games subsequent to the Sochi Olympic Winter Games.” That means they won’t be able to compete in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.
The Oswald Commission also left it up to the International Ski Federation (FIS) to “consider any further action within its own competence.”
The decision is partially a result of hearings held on Monday, where the athletes were present. Several other Russian skiers also had hearings on the same day, and the results of their cases have not yet been announced.
The decision released was a summary, and the detailed reasoning behind it is not yet available.
The athletes will have the option of appealing the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and a statement from the athletes’ lawyer says that they will do so “at the latest tomorrow.”
(Update #1) It is unknown what evidence the Oswald Commission primarily relied on to make its decision, but CAS has signaled that it largely trusts evidence from the McLaren report, the investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which back in 2016 revealed manipulation of the anti-doping process at the 2014 Olympics.
The Oswald Commission was intended to gather additional evidence. It also re-examined anti-doping sample bottles from Sochi. Professor Richard McLaren had sent the bottles to a forensic analysis lab in London, which determined that the bottles had been tampered with. The Oswald Commission asked a laboratory at the University of Lausanne to develop its own procedure to confirm this finding.
Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory who turned whistleblower to The New York Times and whose testimony formed a large basis of the McLaren report, reportedly testified to the Oswald Commission on Saturday.
One aspect of the decision seems potentially vulnerable to appeal. In the past, CAS has ruled that lifetime Olympic bans are not allowed. In those cases, however, its reasoning was more concerned with putting athletes into double jeopardy than to an inherent problem with the concept of a lifetime ban.
In 2008, the IOC put into force what was deemed the “Osaka Rule”, stating that any athlete who had served a doping ban longer than six months could not compete in the next Olympics, even if their suspension was completed. An American athlete, LaShawn Merritt, appealed this to CAS, which found in his favor that the IOC could not, in effect, lengthen a suspension which had already been determined by a different organization.
The decision turned on considerations of double jeopardy, the principle that a person should not be punished a second time for an action which had already been adjudicated. CAS was concerned that an athlete in these circumstances would be punished twice for “the same behavior.” The Merritt decision does not seem to establish that a lifetime Olympic ban is per se impermissible, if reached for the correct procedural and substantive reasons.
Then, ahead of the 2012 Olympics, the British Olympic Association tried to insert a provision into their team qualification procedures that any athlete who had previously served a doping ban was ineligible for the Games, even if their suspension had been completed. CAS knocked this down, deeming the additional ban an illegal “extra sanction” that was not in compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code.
(Update #2) Elena Välbe, head of the Russian Ski Federation for cross-country skiing, did discuss the hearings in the Russian press to some extent. She indicated that the Lausanne lab had found problems with some of the sample bottles. “They found that … some of our athletes also had them, probably the biggest problem in this respect is with Alexander Legkov,” she told R-Sport on Monday, according to a translation, before adding, “but, in fact, there is no other evidence.”
Sources also indicated to R-Sport that the other four Russian skiers whose cases are being considered — Julia Ivanova, Evgenia Shapovalova, Alexey Petukhov and Maxim Vylezhanin — will likely get the same treatment that has been given to Legkov and Belov.
Indeed, Vylegzhanin – another member of the Russian relay team, and the silver medalist in the 50 k – told sports.ru that “If such a verdict is passed on them, then this can be expected for us.”
(Update #3) If both Legkov and Vylegzhanin are disqualified, there could be a substantial medal re-allocation in the men’s 50 k. Third-place Ilia Chernousov, also from Russia but not implicated the McLaren report, would stand to gain gold. Fourth-place Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway would take silver, and fifth-place Sergei Dolidovich of Belarus would earn bronze.
In the men’s relay, third-place France (Jean Marc Gaillard, Maurice Manificat, Robin Duvillard, and Ivan Perillat Boiteux) would earn silver, and fourth-place Norway (Eldar Rønning, Chris Andre Jespersen, Sundby, and Petter Northug) would earn bronze.
Vylegzhanin also won silver in the men’s team sprint with Nikita Kriukov. Were that result invalidated, Sweden’s Emil Jönsson and Teodor Peterson would move from bronze to silver, and fourth-place Northug and Ola Vigen Hattestad would earn bronze.
It would be a huge reversal for the Norwegian men’s cross-country team, which originally won only two medals in Sochi (gold by Hattestad in the sprint and bronze by Sundby in the 30 k skiathlon). This seeming underperformance was a source of disappointment to the team and the nation at the time.
“We do not know the details and only have information through the media, but this is a sad and disappointing day for international skiing,” Norwegian Ski Federation President Erik Røste said in a press release, according to a translation. “We are now awaiting a reason for the IOC’s decision, and many suggest that we will get more detailed information in the days to come… those involved have already stated that they will appeal the judgments, and we hope there will be a final decision as quickly as possible.”
“This is just sad for cross-country sports, no matter what the conclusions of the case are… If this ends with me receiving Olympic medals, I won’t enjoy them with this backdrop,” Sundby said in the same press release.
Were the medals to be reallocated in this way, several athletes would become first-time medalists. That includes Dolidovich, who never podiumed at the international level but was fourth in the 30 k skiathlon at the 2011 World Championships and fifth in the 50 k mass start at 2009 World Championships, as well as having eleven World Cup top-10’s.
It would also be the first time Norway’s Rønning or Jespersen received Olympic medals; Rønning had won four World Championships relay gold medals for Norway, as well as a sprint bronze of his own in 2009, but Jespersen was a first-time Olympian who had never before competed at a World Championships.
After anchoring Norway to fourth in the men’s 4 x 10-kilometer relay at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Petter Northug congratulates the Russian silver medalists, including anchor Maxim Vylegzhanin. As a result of the IOC’s decision to sanction two Russians that competed in Sochi, Russia is to return its relay medal; Norway will thus be awarded bronze and France silver.
This article has been updated to include comments from Canadian World Cup Team member Alex Harvey as told to Le Journal de Montrealon Wednesday.
“Hell yes, IOC. Finally starting to take some action,” U.S. Ski Team (USST) member Simi Hamilton wrote on Twitter. “I have a feeling pressure from us clean athletes has paid off!”
“Today marks a win for clean athletes,” USST Women’s Coach Matt Whitcomb tweeted. “Two cheats are out. It’s a start.”
The Russian men’s relay team meets Maxim Vylegzhanin at the finish after he anchored them to silver in the 4 x 10 k at the Sochi Olympics. The IOC recently ruled that the Russian team’s relay result should be invalidated and they are to return their medals.
Norway’s Petter Northug posted a photo on Instagram of what looked like brunch in a tropical setting with the words: “Feire OL bronse!” (translates to “Celebrating Olympic bronze!”). Northug already has four Olympic medals to his name, two of which are gold (all from the 2010 Olympics), but the men’s 4 x 10-kilometer Olympic relay medal from 2014, which will be awarded retroactively to the Norwegian team (after they placed fourth behind Sweden in first, Russia in second and France in third) will be the first medal for Northug’s teammates Eldar Rønning and Chris Andre Jespersen.
Later on Wednesday, Northug posted a jocular meme on Instagram, picturing himself racing in the Sochi relay with the words: “You know you are the best anchor when you bring the medal home 4 years after the race.”
Legkov was part of Russia’s silver-medal relay in Sochi, and as a result of the IOC’s ruling, he must return the two medals he won there (relay silver and 50 k gold). Additionally, the 2014 Olympic results of Legkov and Belov are to be voided and both athletes are barred from competing at (or being granted credentials to) future Olympics. However, both are expected to appeal the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) by this Thursday at the latest.
“It is weird to get the medal in the mail. But if he gets convicted, of course I will take it,” Jespersen told Norway’s Nettavisen, according to a translation. “It’s my only Olympic medal. It is clear I will take it.”
In an interview with Le Journal de Montreal, Alex Harvey, the leading member of the Canadian World Cup Team who finished third in the overall World Cup and second in the distance standings last season, said he had his suspicions about Legkov — particularly after the 50 k freestyle mass start (in which Harvey placed 19th).
Canada’s Alex Harvey (front, bib 19) racing in the freestyle sprint at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He finished 19th on the day. Also pictured: Russia’s Sergey Ustiugov (2) made it to the final and placed fifth. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
“On the climbs, we could see he was artificially stronger than the rest,” Harvey said, according to a translation. “In Sochi, the last two kilometers were filled with big climbs. It was a course made for Russians knowing that they were doping.”
He added that the end of each course in Sochi ended with a long, brutal uphill that was exceptionally “physically demanding”.
As for the recent doping bans involving professional cross-country skiers, Harvey said, “It’s a shame because our sport is now compared with cycling. It is in cross-country skiing and in biathlon that the largest number of dope cases occur.”
And while he was in favor of the IOC’s decision, he hoped the buck wouldn’t stop there.
“I’m happy that the IOC finally acted, but Russian skiers are still racing … and one in particular who wasn’t bad in Lahti,” he said, alluding to Sergey Ustiugov, who took gold or silver in all five races he competed in at Lahti World Championships.
“Ustiugov was young at the Sochi [Olympic Games], but he still reached the final in the sprint,” Harvey said. “Three of the top six men fell, but he was on his way to a podium that day. What the McLaren Report revealed was that the full team was involved in doping. But Ustiugov’s name never came out. And as long as his name doens’t come up, we can only have doubts.”
Meanwhile, the law firm representing Legkov and Belov is enraged, according to Nettavisen.
“The decision deserves the term scandal,” the Wieschemann firm stated in its press release on Wednesday. “[It] mocks the declaration of the President of the IOC, Dr. Thomas Bach, to decide only on the basis of secure evidence.”
While the IOC’s Disciplinary Commission (also referred to as the Oswald Commission) has yet to release its full decision and explain how it arrived at the final rulings, cases for 26 other Russian athletes (four of which are nordic skiers) who allegedly doped in Sochi are still pending, the CBC reported.
“The Oswald Commission has announced that all hearings for active athletes who could qualify for the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 will be completed by the end of November,” the IOC stated.
As of Wednesday, exactly 100 days out from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, it remained unclear whether the commission obtained further evidence concerning Legkov and Belov beyond what was already presented to the CAS.
Wieschemann claims the commission ruled “without further investigation and without further evidence…”
“Denis Oswald still stated at the last summit of the IOC that his investigations would go far beyond those of Prof. Richard McLaren,” the firm’s press release stated. “Well that’s actually not the case. The investigation has only been limited to obtaining a new forensic opinion…”
And while some of the most outspoken individuals in the XC world continue to speak out, others are weighing in on social media as well.
“… It’s disturbing to find out that some athletes in cross-country skiing have likely doped, and have gone so long unpunished,” Caitlin Patterson of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project wrote on Facebook. “But it reminds me that we must be vigilant, keep looking for ways to support anti-doping testing programs, put pressure on governing bodies to take a stand for clean sport, educate ourselves on progress and pitfalls of the cause, and speak up when we can.
“I haven’t spoken much on this politicized topic, but recent news such as this disqualification makes me distinctly aware of how much I value clean sport and all it stands for,” Patterson, who has started 27 World Cup races, continued. “Thank you IOC for taking this step towards preserving clean sport! Let’s keep it going, keep the pressure on, and fight to #CompeteClean and #PlayTrue!”
Former U.S. skier Sylvan Ellefson, who retired in 2014 after racing 23 World Cups, took to Instagram: “Thankful that our @usnordicskiteam contingency all get to move up a couple spots, but I mostly feel for those who have always been moral in their decision making. Those who train and race relentlessly, with their head down, just to find out their competition is taking the easy road. I could go on, but nothing lights me up more than cheaters.”
Rosie Brennan on her way to 35th in the 10 k classic in Oberstdorf, Germany, as part of the 2016 Tour de Ski. Brennan is an athlete representative to U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and recently participated in a call between the leadership of the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, with 50 other athlete representatives. The athletes had the chance to ask questions about current doping investigations and anti-doping policy. (Photo: Marcel Hilger)
Other racers, too, have a big stake in the outcome. For them, whether FIS brings a case or not feels symbolic of whether action will ever be taken to resolve the allegations of years of systematic doping orchestrated by the Russian state.
FIS says that it is waiting on evidence from a commission which is part of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In an email to FasterSkier, Legkov’s lawyer, Christof Wieschemann, wrote that the IOC commission would have a hearing for his client on Monday.
“We’re getting really close and I haven’t heard anything [from FIS] yet,” said Rosie Brennan, a U.S. Ski Team member and athlete with the Alaska Pacific University elite team. “I guess that’s one of my biggest fears. It’s what is really going to tell us if the IOC chose to do more investigations just to drag things out. If FIS can’t make a decision by October 31st because these investigations aren’t finished, well, there we have our answer.”
As the controversy over systematic doping in Russia continues unresolved, athletes are becoming louder in demanding action.
Back in December, over 100 cross-country skiers signed a letter expressing frustration with the IOC for not being tougher on doping, and asking for a meeting with International Ski Federation (FIS) President Gian Franco Kasper. That meeting – where IOC President Thomas Bach was also present – happened in February at Nordic World Championships in Lahti, Finland.
Meanwhile in Germany, athletes feel that their representation within the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) was not meaningful and in order to make their actions more powerful, they may leave the organization and form their own union.
Against this backdrop, the leadership of the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) organized a conference call earlier this month with athlete representatives from different national and international sports federations around the world.
“It was actually a very last minute thing,” Brennan, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s cross-country athlete representative, said in an interview. “It was unclear whether that was intentional or not, but one way or the other, the U.S. Ski Team didn’t find out about the meeting until very last minute.”
In theory, the only American athletes on the call should have been athlete representatives to the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) or to international fedrations like FIS and the International Biathlon Union. (U.S. biathlete Lowell Bailey is one of that body’s representatives, and was on the call.)
But because the call was not well publicized, it turned out that the USOC representatives couldn’t participate. So Brennan did instead.
When she decided to become an athlete representative, she said, she wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that she would wind up on international conference calls with the likes of WADA Director General Olivier Niggli. Traditionally, U.S. Ski and Snowboard representatives – who come from sports as diverse as alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, and snowboarding – deal more with domestic issues.
But the doping scandal has had a huge effect on the cross-country ski community, and so she has been very engaged with the issue.
“I am the only cross-country athlete on the committee,” she said. “At each of our meetings we each give a sport-specific update, and last year a lot of my updates revolved around anti-doping because of everything that was happening. I was really excited because all the other members were super supportive and wanted to help fight for us, and work harder for clean sport. I was really encouraged by that, because a lot of those sports, I don’t think it’s really an issue for them… that was really encouraging and it made me want to do a little more on the anti-doping front.”
During the conference call, questions from the athletes to the IOC and WADA leadership just about doping took up more than an hour and a half.
The athletes made it clear that they continue to be skeptical of the IOC’s handling of the scandal. An independent investigation created by WADA presented findings in 2016 of widespread doping in Russia, including over 1,000 documents used as evidence. That investigation also did forensic testing of the glass bottles used to collect anti-doping samples, finding that some bottles belonging to Russian athletes at the 2014 Olympics had been tampered with.
The IOC convened two more commissions, headed by Denis Oswald and Samuel Schmid, to investigate the allegations further before taking disciplinary action against any athletes or against Russia as a country, for instance by barring Russian teams from competition.
“I think that was the biggest question we all still left with: Why are there two more investigations happening following the McLaren Report?” Brennan said, referring to the WADA independent investigation. “I think most athletes felt that the McLaren Report was very thorough and clear, and why there’s two more investigations happening just seems strange. I guess their answer was the McLauren Report didn’t look at all the sides well enough, and was never a report supposed to indict people. So they felt they needed to have these two follow-up investigations. But from an athlete perspective, I think that’s just a hard thing, because to me it feels like they’re dragging their feet a little bit in decisions.
“The other hard part is that Oswald is part of the IOC, so it doesn’t feel terribly independent to me,” she continued. “So I think we still all kind of left with those questions in mind.”
Brennan said that relatively little new information was presented to the athletes. Updates were given on the compliance of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), which is still not accredited to do doping tests within Russia without oversight from another agency.
In order to be deemed compliant, WADA has said that Russia must acknowledge and apologize for the doping offenses committed in the last years, and also open a storage room in the Moscow laboratory which could contain more evidence of doping. So far, the government has refused to do either, and the storage room of the laboratory remains locked.
“A lot of people are wondering why haven’t they been able to get access, and what in that lab is useful at this point,” Brennan said. “They were pretty honest in saying that they don’t think anything is going to be in that lab. Because that lab only kept samples for three months, and it’s been much more than three months now [since the time the allegations refer to] so the chances of anything still being in there are really slim… I was happy that they were so honest about that, but it was also a bummer to hear. It just seems like another example of them dragging their feet. They keep putting this out there as a reason [that the investigation isn’t finished], when it’s not a very good reason.”
Brennan was impressed to be part of this international community – according to the IOC, 51 athlete representatives were on the call – but also saw that the level of engagement and self-confidence to demand action were not evenly distributed around the group.
“Every question that was asked was a good one,” she said. “The frustrating part was that every person that talked was either Canadian or American, except for I think one Brit had a question… it just further made clear that athletes in other countries either are choosing not to read the information, or are not getting the information, or just simply… aren’t really willing to take that stance. That’s really hard because I feel it needs to be an international effort to see some significant change. I hope that those other international athletes that were on the call at least took in that information and saw what Americans and Canadians are really pushing for, and maybe fired them up a little bit to go home and get some support going.”
That’s the kind of change that the head of Brennan’s team thinks is necessary.
“I truly believe that if the athletes get together, work with some really smart people, decide how they would like it to work, make a worldwide demand for that – they have the control,” Tiger Shaw, the CEO of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, said in an interview last week. “It is still about them. You can’t have the competitions without them. They provide the commercial value for all of these contests.”
He sees athlete leaders as having a unique ability to make demands. It is one of the reasons that the U.S. is pushing for cross-country skier Kikkan Randall, who was previously the FIS athlete representative and helped make the meeting between skiers, IOC President Bach, and FIS President Kasper happen last year, to get elected as an IOC member at the upcoming Olympics in February.
“She has a track record already of being involved in governance and caring deeply about it, even while she’s competing, which is kind of rare,” Shaw said of Randall. “It’s a more critical position than ever [to be on] the IOC. It needs someone who can help push the IOC forward in all the ways it needs to reform its governance – a strong athlete voice there is going to be critical.”
Brennan, for one, recognizes that not all athletes are comfortable being that loud voice. Some may also simply not want to deal with this not-very-uplifting topic, even within their own minds, and instead focus on training and being the best they can be in competition.
“When I go out and train, it’s like the last thing I’m thinking about, so I guess I’ve been able to compartmentalize it pretty well,” Brennan laughed. “But I do feel a little bit torn when I try to communicate this information to my teammates and other U.S. skiers. I do know that some people prefer to just not pay attention to it and just focus on their training. The challenging part for me is that I want to be respectful of how my teammates to prepare for the season, but I also want them to have the information that’s out there. So I try to include some links so they can choose whether to click on them… I think it’s just one of the skills you have to learn as an athlete is how to compartmentalize those things and not let it affect your training. When you go to race, you go to race regardless of who is there and who’s not there.”
The Court of Arbitration for Sport decided that there was a “reasonable possibility” that Alexander Legkov had doped at the 2014 Olympics. Here, he pumped his fist after Russia claimed silver in the 4 x 10 k relay, their nation’s first medal in cross-country at the Sochi Olympics.
Nearly two weeks ago now, the lawyer for Russian cross-country skier Alexander Legkov published the decision a panel at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) had come to after a hearing in May.
Legkov has been suspended by the International Ski Federation (FIS) since December, 2016, because of his presence in the McLaren Report, an investigation commissioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to assess potential state-sponsored doping by Russia at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Legkov won a gold medal in the 50-kilometer freestyle in Sochi, and is mentioned in multiple places in the McLaren Report’s evidence packet.
As we summarized last week, CAS agreed that it was justified for FIS to provisionally suspend Legkov pending further investigations into whether he committed a Anti-Doping Rule Violation (ADRV).
However, CAS decided that this provisional suspension could not be infinite and gave it an Oct. 31, 2017, deadline. After that point, FIS must either bring a full ADRV case against Legkov, or drop the provisional suspension until they have new information.
Besides the new deadline, there were a number of interesting details in the 51-page decision from CAS.
Before diving into them, the background: the IOC and FIS are considering a specific ADRV for Legkov: “tampering or attempted tampering with any part of the Doping Control”, outlined in the IOC Anti-Doping Rules for Sochi.
That’s because one of Legkov’s urine sample bottles showed suspicious marks when examined by a forensic expert in the McLaren Report. The conclusion was that the bottle must have been opened after the sample had already been collected, presumably in order to swap out a “dirty” urine sample for a “clean” one. This was the scheme outlined by the McLaren Report as well as news outlets such as The New York Times, whereby the Russians systematically cheated the anti-doping system.
Thus, the case hinges not on one doping sample: a urine sample collected on Feb. 23, 2014, the day Legkov won the 50 k.
Provisional Suspensions Don’t Have the Same Standard as Final Decisions
Alexander Legkov (3) beat out fellow Russians Maxim Vylegzhanin (not shown) and Ilya Chernousov (r) for gold in the Sochi Olympics 50 k freestyle mass start — the last race of the 2014 Games. The sample bottle for Legkov’s anti-doping urine sample collected the same day showed signs of tampering.
The suspension that Legkov was appealing was a provisional suspension, not a final one. FIS is still considering whether and how to bring a doping violation case against him, at which point there will be a different set of hearings and, if he’s found guilty, the implementation of a ban. (The long delay is because FIS is waiting on evidence from another IOC panel in order to bring their case.) In that case, the standard suspension for a first-time doping offense is four years; as of today, Legkov has been provisionally suspended for nearly 10 months.
FIS outlined in their pleadings why it is important to keep suspected dopers out of competition while their cases are investigated:
“Maintaining the suspension mitigates the ‘serious further risk’ of requiring retroactive disqualification of the Athlete (should he be found guilty of an ADRV),” the CAS Panel wrote in summarizing FIS’s position. “The potential need to revisit rankings, re-distribute medals, or otherwise modify competition results would ‘diminish the value’ of competition for participants, sponsors, and the viewing public.”
CAS did not have a problem with this system, writing that “the provisional suspension occupies a space in which an ADRV is asserted, but not yet proven.” This is important, as it is likely to be used more and more frequently as the types of doping cases being tried gets more diverse.
When there is a positive drug test, things often move forward fairly quickly. A mandatory provisional suspension is automatically triggered with a positive “A” sample (once it is established that the athlete does not have a Therapeutic Use Exemption for the substance), and there’s not much debate as to whether this is justified or not. From there it is on to analyzing the “B” sample and having hearings.
But in non-traditional cases, which are becoming more and more common, provisional suspensions might play a bigger role – and putting them into place will have more gray areas. This includes cases like autologous blood doping, where athletes extract some of their blood, save it for later, and then re-infuse is to get a boost of red blood cells and oxygen-carrying capacity. There are (at the moment) few good chemical markers of this type of blood doping and all evidence must be observed directly.
Other cases, too, sometimes rely on direct observation of doping, police finding doping materials, or paper or electronic files indicating wrongdoing, even in the absence of a positive doping test. The four-year ban of Austrian cross-country skier Harald Wurm is one example.
Because provisional suspensions are intended to keep athletes out of competition while their cases are being fully investigated, the standard of proof required to implement and maintain a provisional suspension is less stringent than it is for an actual doping violation. By definition, evidence is still being gathered.
In American civil law, the approximate analogy is to the situation in which someone seeks a temporary restraining order to protect themselves from a partner whom they fear will cause them domestic violence. The standard of proof that must be met to receive such an order is one of the lowest standards used in American law, because it is important to act quickly in this situation and because a longer follow-up hearing will be held soon after at which more evidence can be developed.
Thus, merely having doubts about the evidence is not enough to overturn such a suspension: “In this appeal, a provisional decision is overturned if it has ‘no reasonable prospect of being upheld,’” the Panel wrote.
So: a provisional suspension can be put in place if there is a “reasonable possibility” of a doping violation existing, and can only be overturned if there is “no reasonable prospect” of a doping violation being proven.
In CAS’s view, FIS was justified in putting the provisional suspension into place last December. And secondly, CAS did not think that Legkov had proved that there was ‘no reasonable prospect’ of further developing their case, so the provisional suspension was upheld, albeit with a deadline.
CAS Generally Trusts McLaren and Rodchenkov, With Caveats
Legkov and his legal team argued that the McLaren Report was riddled with errors and that it was never meant to establish the guilt of specific athletes anyway, only to investigate the mechanism of systematic doping. As such, he argued, the report shouldn’t be weighed too heavily in proceedings.
Richard McLaren speaking at a news conference in Toronto regarding his WADA-commissioned report on state-sponsored doping in Russia.
Likewise, the team painted Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the biggest whistleblower in the Russian doping scandal and a major source for McLaren’s report, as an unreliable source.
Quite separately from Legkov, the Russian government has also been seeking to discredit Rodchenkov. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev called him “scum”, his assets were seized, and there’s currently a warrant out for his arrest.
While agreeing that the evidence in the McLaren Report was not enough to prove a doping violation, CAS signaled that in general it trusted the evidence and that it certainly shouldn’t be ignored completely.
“It would however follow from the report’s findings as to the corruption of an entire system, devised to favor selected athletes, that some individual athletes must have benefited,” CAS wrote of the argument that the McLaren Report was not intended to identify individual athletes for disciplinary measures. “It could not sensibly be concluded that whereas the system was corrupt in the manner identified nonetheless no athlete drew advantage.”
The one exception: emails that Rodchenkov shared with McLaren. The emails are fascinating, but CAS wrote that they were “without context” and therefore very difficult to rely on as indicators of anything in particular.
On Rodchenkov, too, CAS indicated that they value the testimony of whistleblowers, even and especially if those individuals have broken the rules in the past.
“Although the Appellant has strongly challenged the credibility of Dr. Rodchenkov, the Panel observes first of all that the testimony of persons guilty of wrongdoing themselves can be decisive in establishing the guilt of others, and that the extent of their own culpability may even add to their value, since it is likely to be the result of their extensive involvement, at high levels, in the unlawfulness being examined,” the decision said.
Relatedly, CAS recently used evidence from the McLaren Report to uphold the ban of a Russian triple jumper. According to documents in the evidence packet, she had participated in a “washout” scheme where she took performance-enhancing drugs at home in Russia, where positive tests were suppressed, and then traveled to international competitions once the drugs were undetectable.
McLaren Didn’t Show
All parties probably would have loved to ask Professor Richard McLaren, who assembled the McLaren Report, some questions. But they couldn’t. The Canadian was invited to the hearing but declined – CAS wrote that he “chose not to make himself available.”
“From its perspective, the Panel regrets Professor McLaren’s absence and unavailability for questioning,” they wrote. “In any event, neither the Appellant nor the Panel has been able to pose questions to the person under whose supervision and control the evidence that fundamentally informs the suspension under appeal was gathered and organized.”
McLaren did give FIS a sworn statement, but it was after the deadline had passed for the two legal teams to exchange evidence. So it was not permitted to be used in the proceedings.
McLaren’s absence would have had stronger implications than simply the panel’s disappointment were this an American criminal case. The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Confrontation Clause of the U.S. Constitution as requiring that a criminal defendant be able to cross-examine (that is, to “confront”) a witness against him, and specifically that prior out-of-court statements by a now-unavailable witness may not be used against hi at tria. McLaren’s physical absence from this hearing, in a case based almost exclusively on evidence he had previously gathered (but that the parties had not previously had a chance to ask him about), would have sufficed to overturn a conviction obtained on this basis under American criminal law.
‘I Live in Europe’ Is Not Enough
One of Legkov’s main refrains through this whole ordeal has been that he was training outside of Russia for the time leading up to the 2014 Olympics, and so could not have participated in a state-sponsored doping program.
Legkov and Swiss physiotherapist Isabelle Knaute at the finish of the 35 k stage of the Tour de Ski in 2012.
“To the extent that any opportunity might have existed to tamper, moreover, the Appellant considers it precluded by virtue of his geographical isolation from Russia,” the CAS Panel wrote in its summary of Legkov’s arguments. “The Appellant’s trainings have taken place outside of Russia since 2011, under the supervision of non-Russian coaches and personnel. Similarly, the Appellant has ‘used exclusively medical services in Davos,’ Switzerland (stemming from an apparent disappointment with Russian doctors following a bout of exercise-induced asthma in 2008).”
But at some other point in the hearings, Legkov seems to have made the argument that Russian officials could have taken urine provided during medical tests he occasionally had to undergo in Moscow, and swapped it out from his Sochi sample without his knowledge or consent. Legkov’s Instagram does show him spending at least some time in Russia at a few points in the last few years – as would be expected. It’s his home country.
Furthermore, with the Olympics being in Russia, Legkov was by nature back in Russia before the Games. This was the time period the CAS panel seized on in agreeing that yes, there was a “reasonable possibility” that he could have committed a doping violation.
“While Mr. Legkov’s geographical distance might complicate day-to-day participation in the ‘chain of distribution’ of performance-enhancing drugs prior to Sochi, it does little to quell the reasonable suspicion arising from his appearance on lists relating specifically to the Olympics.”
This is interesting because the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the international governing body for track and field, suspended the Russian track federation after the first part of the McLaren Report came out. As a result, Russian athletes could not compete in international events. But the IAAF made exceptions for athletes who lived and trained outside of Russia and were assumed to be tested routinely by non-Russian doping agencies.
The difference may be that in that case, the IAAF was assessing athletes’ current status and trying to protect current competitions. They knew which athletes to track; further testing can be ordered, to the extent that the federation trusts an athlete is clean at, say, World Championships.
In this case, FIS is trying to adjudicate a case from years past, rather than prevent doping in the future.
‘I Passed Many Tests’ Is Not Enough, Especially Since the McLaren Report Says Tests Were Suppressed
Like many other doped and non-doped athletes before him, Legkov argued that he had passed so many doping tests that his reputation should help absolve him from suspicion.
Photos of a sample bottle from the McLaren Report’s evidence packet.
CAS didn’t buy this argument, and indicated that Russian athletes may in fact have a much harder time using it in the future. The McLaren Report indicated that one of Russia’s strategies to get their doped athletes to competition was to simply alter test results in ADAMS, the international anti-doping results management database, from “positive” to “clean”.
As such, the database can’t be relied upon.
“The Panel considers it difficult to draw a conclusion from an athlete’s appearance or absence in ADAMS, given Professor McLaren’s indication that the Moscow Laboratory routinely manipulated and concealed test results,” the Panel wrote.
Legkov was tested at least once by Russian authorities between Jan. 1, 2014, and when he arrived in Sochi for the Olympics.
“The Appellant provided at least thirteen samples between 1 January 2014 and 5 February 2014, the date of his arrival in Sochi; at least twelve of these tested clean by laboratories outside of Russia and ‘without any chance’ to be manipulated,” CAS wrote in their summary of Legkov’s legal team’s arguments.
In an email to FasterSkier, Legkov’s lawyer Christof Wieschemann wrote that the one remaining test was collected by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) in Switzerland, and analyzed in Moscow. However, the very next day FIS collected “a sample for blood, blood passport and urine, [and] analyzed in Cologne [Germany].”
(Note: a previous version of this story assumed that the RUSADA test had taken place in Russia. According to Wieschemann, that is incorrect.)
‘I Passed a Test Two Days Before’ Is Not Enough
Legkov provided three urine samples and one blood sample at the 2014 Olympics; only the last urine sample showed signs of tampering. He argued that since the other samples were clean, he could not have doped at the Olympics.
“During the Olympic Games themselves, the Appellant adds, three urine samples were submitted, including one sample on 21 February 2014, i.e., a mere two days before the urine sample which according to the IOC exhibited signs of tampering and which triggered the provisional suspension,” CAS wrote of Legkov’s argument. “The Appellant accordingly considers it ‘evident that he did not use the cocktail prior to or within the Olympic Games.’”
CAS found this, well, ridiculous, especially given that the “Duchess Cocktail” – the mixture of illicit drugs alleged to be given to top Russian athletes whose “dirty” urine samples were later swapped out for “clean” ones – quickly disappears from the body, becoming undetectable.
The silver-medal Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics.
“Intermittent consumption aimed at exploiting the cocktail’s short wash-out periods is entirely possible and, potentially in the Appellant’s case, desirable (given strict controls he faced in Europe prior to his arrival in Sochi),” CAS wrote.
“It is hardly unusual for doped athletes to start and stop the consumption of performance-boosting substances abruptly, evading detection,” the panel continued. “Sufficient time (nine days) lapsed between the first and latter two samples for traces of the Duchess cocktail to dissipate; similarly, to the extent that the Appellant may have waited until shortly before his Gold medal-winning event to begin taking the cocktail, the two-day period separating his second (clean) and third (suspected) urine samples does not lift the cloud of suspicion established by this inclusion in the Duchess List and related documents.”
What Was FIS Doing About the Other 40 Cases?
In its arguments, FIS repeatedly held up the McLaren Report as a reliable source of evidence.
Furthermore, the arguments indicated that FIS had been paying attention since the day the report dropped, Dec. 9, 2016.
“The IOC’s notification letter dated 22 December 2016 laid out compelling evidence [about Legkov] that had been known to the Federation since at least 9 December 2016,” the CAS panel wrote in summarizing FIS’s position. “The unprecedented scale of Professor McLaren’s allegations in combination with athlete-specific data in the EDP, FIS insists, required an immediate and resolute response.”
While FIS may have made a relatively fast response with regard to Legkov and five others, it appears to have not taken public action in other cases. From FasterSkier’s assessment of the Evidentiary Disclosure Package (EDP), there were 46 skiers who were mentioned in the McLaren Report. This represented 99 anti-doping samples. FasterSkier summarized all of them in a database and wrote about the cases.
To public knowledge, however, FIS only issued provisional suspensions to six athletes: Legkov, Maxim Vylegzhanin, Evgeny Belov, Alexei Petukhov, Julia Ivanova, and Evgenia Shapovalova.
These were the six who seemed to be under investigation by the IOC for doping in Sochi. To public knowledge, FIS has not issued any formal sanctions or charges based on any of the other, non-Olympic, evidence in the McLaren Report.
FIS did, however, allow Legkov to keep training with the Russian National Team as of Jan. 18, 2017, “an accomodation intended to allow him to maintain his competitiveness pending the resolution of his case.”
Competing in Sport Is Not a Fundamental Right or Liberty
Legkov made the argument that his right to a fair trial was being infringed upon, because he was being suspended without any charge. His legal team called on Swiss law to overturn the FIS suspension; in the CAS summary, they wrote that Legkov alleged “the provisional suspension’s incompatibility with Swiss fundamental rights.”
CAS was not sympathetic, noting that the components of due process under Swiss law – “the Appellant’s right to understand, confront, and refute the evidence against him” – were being followed by the very fact that the hearing was taking place.
“The question under Swiss law, moreover, is not whether the Appellant enjoys certain protections but rather to which degree they find expression vis-à-vis competing notions of associational autonomy,” the Panel wrote. “An athlete subject to sanctions proceedings internal to an association does not ‘require protection in the same measure as, for example, the accused in a criminal proceeding’… CAS sanctions result in a period of ineligibility to compete and forfeiture of prizes, not deprivation of liberty.”
Anti-Doping Rules Are Hard to Write
In determining the “reasonable possibility” standard for proof of a doping violation with regard to provisional suspensions, the CAS Panel waded through several provisions in the FIS Anti-Doping Rules.
They found unclear the order in which provisions were supposed to be considered, and found that some provisions might even be inconsistent with others. While the Panel eventually decided that there was a clear way around this problem, they were not complimentary of the FIS rules.
“Though both options [for interpreting the FIS Rules] have merit, ambiguous drafting frustrates attempts at a definitive interpretation of the FIS Rules’ intended order of precedence,” the Panel wrote at one point.
“A literal focus on the word ‘assertion’ may therefore prove elusive,” they wrote at another. “The drafters’ intent finds no expression in a uniform, literal construction of Articles 7.7 and 7.9.”
It is the second time in just over a year that FIS has been rebuked over clarity of rules, although the first was not fully the fault of the federation.
The case of Norwegian skier Martin Johnsrud Sundby hinged on how to interpret rules about how much salbutamol, an asthma medication, can be inhaled in a certain period of time – and whether a nebulizer counts as an inhaler.
The rule in question was the WADA Code – written by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), not FIS – but in this case, FIS was applying the rule and thus was party to the proceedings.
“The Panel considers that the Athlete genuinely misunderstood the meaning of the β2A Provision, and also itself considers that the β2A Provision could have been drafted more clearly in certain respects (an issue the Panel will return to when discussing the appropriate sanction),” CAS wrote in that decision.
The notion of an adjudicative body critiquing a legislative body for unclear statutory construction is not unusual. The solution is, ideally, for the relevant legislative body to clarify the relevant text in a future session. In the case of asthma medication, the 2018 WADA Prohibited List updated its text on β2-agonists.
It remains to be seen whether FIS (or WADA, the IOC, or other sporting federations which use the same or similar language in their rules) will respond to this portion of CAS’s Legkov decision in the same manner.
Alexander Legkov (c) beat out fellow Russians Maxim Vylegzhanin (not shown) and Ilya Chernousov (r) for gold in the Sochi Olympics 50 k freestyle mass start — the last race of the 2014 Games. Vylegzhanin took silver by 0.7 seconds, just a tenth of a second ahead of Chernousov in third, and Norway’s Martin Johnsrud Sundby (l) missed a medal by 0.2 seconds in fourth. Legkov will soon know whether he is clear to compete this 2017/2018 World Cup season.
That date is drawing near, and although there has been no external sign of progress, action might come soon.
At an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Lima, Peru, last month, Denis Oswald, the Swiss lawyer heading that organizations Disciplinary Commission, told Reuters that the IOC may begin adjudicating the first cases under investigation from the 2014 Olympics in October.
Christof Wieschemann, the German lawyer hired by Sochi gold medalist Alexander Legkov, believes he will hear about his client’s case soon.
“We expect that our case will be the first one which will be brought to Oswald commission hearing,” he wrote in an email to FasterSkier on Friday. “[We] hope it will be clarified until 31 October. But even if not, the athletes are free.”
On the opposite side, FIS Secretary General Sarah Lewis wrote in an email that FIS is awaiting any information from the IOC commission and will act as soon as possible once it receives a directive.
“FIS will not undertake any actions before the findings of the IOC Disciplinary Commission are communicated, which are scheduled to follow in October,” Lewis wrote. “Thereafter FIS will act with any aspects that come within its competence. There is regular communication and coordination between the respective legal experts… We would not be able to enlighten you any further on more precise timings of the IOC Disciplinary Commission and you will have to address this question with the IOC.”
This underscores some awkward dynamics about the case. Because the alleged doping took place at the Olympics, the IOC has jurisdiction to address the cases.
Thus, FIS is waiting for the IOC. But the IOC is operating slowly and very much on a different timeline. Many observers have noted that the IOC is only motivated to adjudicate the cases before the start of the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.
Athletes, obviously, would like the case resolved much more quickly – ideally, long ago. Legkov and the other five skiers have already been suspended for nine months.
Meanwhile, FIS is now facing a deadline mandated by CAS, but is not directly in charge of the investigation themselves.
“The CAS panel left no doubt that the time limit to complete the investigations and to provide the result is not expandable,” Wieschemann wrote. “A longer term would not be reasonable and appropriate regarding the interests of the athletes. The problem is that the investigations are conducted by IOC. They have no problem with the deadline because their ‘deadline’ is the beginning of the Olympic Games, not the season of FIS competitions. However, I suppose that all will do their very best to bring the cases to their end before the deadline expires.”
The CAS Award
Although the CAS decision was announced at the end of May, CAS has still not posted its arbitration award on its website, and so Wieschemann did instead.
Many are taking the decision to mean that Legkov will be free to compete on Nov. 1, and at the upcoming Olympics in South Korea as well.
But with 30 days left in October, that’s not a sure bet.
First of all, CAS did not disagree that it was appropriate for FIS to issue Legkov a provisional suspension in the first case.
It rejected many of Legkov’s arguments about the shortcomings of the McLaren report, which implicated him in a sample-swapping scheme at the 2014 Olympics. One of Legkov’s urine sample bottles was shown to be tampered with, and his name appeared in documents related to the planning of systematic doping.
While this wasn’t enough to prove an anti-doping rule violation, CAS wrote in the decision (available here), it was certainly enough to indicate a “reasonable possibility” of a rule violation, which is all that is required for a provisional suspension while further investigations proceed.
“The Panel concludes that the evidence establishes a ‘reasonable possibility’ of an [anti-doping rule violation] in the Appellant’s case,” the decision reads. “It further considers that the Appellant has not demonstrated with satisfaction the fulfillment of criteria necessary to lift the suspension, though the Panel has decided that it should be modified.”
As that modification, CAS decided that the length of a provisional suspension should not be indefinite. It gave FIS until Oct. 31 to bring an anti-doping rule violation against Legkov – and if they don’t, his provisional suspension will be lifted.
If Legkov’s case is not addressed by the Oswald commission before Oct. 31, but is brought up later with new evidence, FIS can then start over and apply a new provisional suspension. The federation just can’t extend the current suspension based on the current evidence.
“The Panel appreciates the unusual magnitude and complexity of cases awaiting Mr. Oswald’s attention,” the decision noted. “It cannot however endorse an indefinite and indeterminable suspension as proportionate… the Panel deems it appropriate and just that the current provisional suspension expire after 31 October 2017, at which time it will be for FIS to consider whether or not to seek a further suspension justified by new developments.”
So – it’s all down to the IOC, and if they find some speed (and new evidence) in their investigation.
International Politics
Others, too, are impatient.
“If you chose to cheat at the Olympic level, and put banned substances into your blood so you can gain an advantage, I really don’t see any place for that person in the Olympic movement,” U.S. biathlete Lowell Bailey told the Associated Press.
And the athletes are not the only ones frustrated by the IOC’s slow progress.
“A lot of progress has been made, but we’re not there yet,” a Dutch IOC member, told the Associated Press. “I understand it takes a lot of time, but we cannot have this discussion just before the PyeongChang Games. It must be clear months before.”
“The failure to expeditiously investigate individual Russian athlete doping poses a clear and present danger for clean athletes worldwide and at the 2018 Winter Games,” leaders of the organizations, collectively called the National Anti-Doping Organization and including such countries as France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom, wrote. “We have serious doubts that the 2018 Games will be clean due to the incomplete investigation of massive evidence of individual doping by Russians athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games and given the inadequate testing evidence of Russian athletes over the past four years.”
“When you have our International Olympic Committee commissioning additional studies, questioning its own regulatory body, WADA, you wonder, really, who’s controlling all of this? What’s the motivation there?” U.S. Ski and Snowboard CEO Tiger Shaw told the Associated Press. “The investigation has been done. It’s conclusive.”
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that any state-sponsored doping had occurred at the Olympics in Russia.
“In Russia we never had, don’t have, and I hope won’t have a state-sponsored doping program,” he reportedly said on Russian television. “On the contrary, there will only be a fight against doping.”
Several days later, the Russian government issued a warrant for the arrest of Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory who actually helped athletes cheat before turning whistleblower and fleeing the country.
“Russia has refused to accept responsibility,” Rodchenkov recently wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times. “My former boss, Vitaly Mutko, a deputy prime minister and former minister of sport, has repeatedly denied knowledge of my activities as director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Center, where I oversaw Russia’s doping program with help from several agents of the Federal Security Bureau (formerly the K.G.B.), and many government officials.”
Maxim Vylegzhanin competing in the 10 k classic in Falun, Sweden, in 2016. Vylegzhanin is provisionally suspended while the International Olympic Committee investigates possible doping infractions at the 2014 Olympics. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
In part of the media storm following the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s response to an appeal by six Russian cross-country skiers, Russian Ski Federation President Elena Valbe made a surprising assertion: that the athletes, who remain provisionally suspended by the International Ski Federation (FIS), are allowed to train with the national team.
This is not generally the case for athletes serving suspensions, but FIS Anti-Doping Coordinator Sarah Fussek confirmed the organization’s stance.
“You cannot really say it is a deviation [from the norm] because we have not had these [types of] facts on the table before,” she said in a phone interview on Friday. “This is a special case and it requires special handling.”
Are All Provisional Suspensions Created Equal?
FIS more often deals with cases which start with a positive drug test, or “adverse analytical finding”. A positive test results in a nearly-automatic suspension while the case proceeds – called a “mandatory provisional suspension”.
The cases of Alexander Legkov, Maxim Vylegzhanin, Alexey Petukhov, Julia Ivanova, and Evgenia Shapovalova arose via investigation started by journalists, continued by Richard McLaren on behalf of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and now being conducted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
“The investigation of the alleged anti-doping rule violations will be carried out by the IOC Disciplinary Commission, which has the results and case management authority for anti-doping at the Olympic Winter Games, whereby the provisional suspensions are imposed by FIS,” stated a FIS press release announcing the suspensions on Dec. 22, 2016.
In cases without a positive drug test, sports federations are allowed to implement an “optional provisional suspension”. This is what FIS put in place on the six Russian skiers, whose samples were allegedly tampered with at the 2014 Olympics.
Fussek said she awaited a written explanation from the FIS Anti-Doping Panel, which gave the recommendation to the athletes that they could train with their national team again. For privacy reasons and due to rules governing ongoing cases, FIS cannot not share documents which were provided to the athletes explaining such decisions.
However, Fussek understood that it was because of the optional nature of the provisional suspension that the athletes were being allowed to officially train again (all had been training on their own while serving their suspensions).
“As you know, we do not have an adverse analytical finding where a mandatory suspension would have been put in place,” Fussek said. “Presumably they have decided for that, because it was special circumstances… they would give them a special allowance to train. They have decided not to prohibit them to train in order to keep a balance between the provision of the suspension and the actual consequences. It is an ongoing case with special circumstances.”
Indeed, considerable time that has passed with no news or hearings from the IOC investigation. In the ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the organization gave FIS until Oct. 31 to bring a formal case against the athletes, or else their suspensions will be lifted. At that point, they would have waited 10 months.
“The provisional suspension switches into a sanction in face of its duration and the ongoing investigations from which nobody knows how long they will last,” the lawyer for Legkov and Belov wrote in a press release. “The provisional suspension is no longer appropriate if the federation is not in the position to provide full proof that the athlete is guilty of an anti-doping rule violation within a reasonable time.”
FIS is in a strange position because it is waiting on the IOC commission and doesn’t necessarily have control over the time frame. But if allowing the athletes to train with the national team was FIS’s attempt to mitigate these special circumstances and the long wait, it does not appear to have a formal basis in anti-doping rules. There are no specific guidelines in the FIS Anti-Doping Rules or the World Anti-Doping Code specifying what is allowed of athletes under mandatory versus optional provisional suspensions, if indeed there is a difference.
Those rules only note the meaning of a provisional suspension more generally: “Provisional Suspension means the Athlete or other Person is barred temporarily from participating in any Competition or activity prior to the final decision at a hearing conducted under Article 8,” the 2016 FIS Anti-Doping Rules state at the top of page 61.
In prior rulings against the skiers, it was made clear that anything involving the national team was off-limits.
On Dec. 30, 2016, FIS denied an appeal by the skiers, who wanted to be reinstated in time for the Tour de Ski.
“As a result of the decision, all of the above mentioned athletes may not take part in any competitions or national team activities,” FIS wrote in their press release at the time.
And in a Jan. 25, 2017, press release confirming the decision to uphold the provisional suspensions of Alexander Legkov and Evgeny Belov, FIS again wrote, “as a result of the decisions, the above-mentioned athletes may not take part in any competitions or national team activities.”
So what constitutes “activities”? The 2017 International Standard for Testing and Investigations, published by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), defined “team activity” as “Sporting activities carried out by Athletes on a collective basis as part of a team (e.g., training, travelling, tactical sessions) or under the supervision of the team (e.g., treatment by a team doctor).”
However, that was in reference to whereabouts reporting, not to allowable activities under a suspension.
Unwittingly, A Trap?
The skiers may want to be wary of FIS’s allowance. One reason that an athlete’s treatment during a provisional suspension is important is because the time served in a provisional suspension is usually included in the period of their final suspension as well – credit for time served.
“If an Athlete or other Person voluntarily accepts a Provisional Suspension in writing from FIS and thereafter respects the Provisional Suspension, the Athlete or other Person shall receive a credit for such period of voluntary Provisional Suspension against any period of Ineligibility which may ultimately be imposed,” read the FIS Anti-Doping Rules (page 43).
And once an athlete is ineligible, they cannot participate in training or any other national team events.
“No Athlete or other Person who has been declared Ineligible may, during the period of Ineligibility, participate in any capacity in a Competition or activity (other than authorised anti-doping education or rehabilitation programs) authorised or organised by FIS or any National Ski Association or a club or other member organisation of FIS or any National Ski Association, or in Competitions authorised or organised by any professional league or any international or national level Event organisation or any elite or national-level sporting activity funded by a governmental agency,” the FIS Anti-Doping Rules state (page 44).
Below this rule, FIS goes out of its way to clarify even further what types of activities are not allowed during a period of ineligibility.
“For example… an Ineligible Athlete cannot participate in a training camp, exhibition or practice organised by his or her National Ski Association or a club which is a member of that National Ski Association or which is funded by a governmental agency… The term ‘activity’ also includes, for example, administrative activities, such as serving as an official, director, officer, employee, or volunteer of the organisation described in this Article. Ineligibility imposed in one sport shall also be recognised by other sports.”
Logically, time served under a provisional suspension should be counted in any final duration of ineligibility only if an athlete behaved the same way during their provisional suspension as they are required to during ineligibility.
The Russian skiers hope to be proven innocent, and act confident that they will be.
“The athletes will be free to participate in the competition season 2017/2018 and the World Cup 2017/2018 starting 24.11.2017 in Ruka if the ongoing investigations of Oswald Commission of IOC will not bring out new facts and new evidence beyond the facts published by Prof McLaren and if the athletes will not be definitely sanctioned based on such new facts,” Legkov and Belov’s lawyer wrote in their press release. “The defense has no reason to believe that the investigations will bring out such new facts.”
But if the skiers do face sanctions after their final hearings — it would no doubt devastate them if those suspensions started from the hearing date, not from Dec. 22, 2016, when they were very first provisionally suspended.
Alexander Legkov (3) beat out fellow Russians Maxim Vylegzhanin (not shown) and Ilya Chernousov (r) for gold in the Sochi Olympics 50 k freestyle mass start — the last race of the 2014 Games. Vylegzhanin took silver by 0.7 seconds, just a tenth of a second ahead of Chernousov in third, and Norway’s Martin Johnsrud Sundby (1) missed a medal by 0.2 seconds in fourth. Legkov and Vylegzhanin may still have months to go before they learn if they can compete next season.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) did one thing that the Russian skiers wanted: they issued a decision of some sort quickly, far more quickly than is typical in doping appeals.
Alexander Legkov, Maxim Vylegzhanin, Alexey Petukhov, Evgenia Shapovalova, Julia Ivanova, and Evgeniy Belov have been provisionally suspended by the International Ski Federation (FIS) since December. The six cross-country skiers are among a group of Russian athletes whose anti-doping samples from the 2014 Olympics were tampered with, according to an independent investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
In the six months since the provisional suspensions were enacted, FIS has not formally brought Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ARDV’s) against the six athletes. They were asking CAS to cancel their provisional suspensions.
CAS disagreed, but essentially gave FIS a deadline to bring a case forward.
“The CAS Panels in charge of the matters have decided to maintain the provisional suspensions imposed on the athletes until 31 October 2017, at the latest,” the tribunal wrote in a press release. “In the absence of any anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) having been assessed against any of the athletes so far, the temporary suspension shall lapse and the athletes shall be allowed to compete again. A further provisional suspension may be imposed on the athletes by the International Ski Federation (FIS) after that date, if the facts and circumstances so merit, and would be subject to appeal.”
While detailed minutes of the May 25 hearings for the Russian skiers were not released, CAS did give a glimpse into some of the evidence that may have been presented. Namely, FIS apparently provided a timeframe for their own investigation, and that was based on a separate timeline from the International Olympic Committee.
“The Panels in charge of these matters have noted that the reports following the investigations conducted by a special IOC commission would be delivered during the summer period and found that it was necessary to allow the FIS time to complete its own investigation before issuing its final decisions concerning the six athletes,” the tribunal wrote.
The skiers were not pleased.
“Of course, the whole situation is very angering,” Vylegzhanin told Sport-Express, according to a translation. “I would like to calmly train and prepare for the season, just knowing that it will happen. But apparently, we will have to get used to the idea that until October 31, we are in a special situation. At the same time, there is a hope that we will get the all-clear before the season…. Sometimes, during hard training, I have bad thoughts anyway, because of this whole situation. But I hope this will not interfere with my preparations for the season. The thoughts about the upcoming Olympic Games in Pyeongchang motivate me to work in full.”
The others are also training and planning to compete. Legkov reportedly ran a 32:10 10 k at a charity running race recently; both he and Petukhov recently posted cycling pictures from training camps on the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, Russian Ski Federation President Elena Valbe said in a separate interview with Sport-Express that FIS was allowing the suspended athletes to train with the Russian National Team, a major departure from normal rules for suspended athletes.
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