At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia racked up 11 gold medals to tie Norway with the most gold. The U.S. had a total of 10 gold medals. The games were a huge propaganda win for the Kremlin, which has always used athletics to promote their image.
Now, due to widespread doping in the Russian athletic community, Russia's gold medal total is likely to be reduced by one, with evidence that gold medal winner Evgeny Ustyugov was using a banned steroid. The Russian Olympic team was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea for widespread doping. For the Russians, the cheating runs deep and official, as the linked article notes:
"Four years ago, Russia was caught in one of the most sophisticated doping programs in sports history, one that helped push Russia over the top at the Olympics it hosted. Russia’s own antidoping experts and agents of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the K.G.B., carefully studied the bottles in which athletes’ urine was held for testing and, operating at night in a drug laboratory, replaced samples tainted by performance enhancing drugs.
To resolve this case, Russia had agreed to provide a database of test results going back several years before the Sochi games. Though Russia was under tremendous pressure to come clean about the doping program, these computer files, it turned out, had also been tampered with, the World Anti-Doping Agency said in November."
The ruling on Saturday related to this computer tampering, not the manipulations by the Russian security services with the urine bottles." (our emphasis)This should anger every nation that competed in those Olympic games. The World Anti-Doping Agency has already banned Russia from international competition for four years, including this year's Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Although individual Russian athletes not involved in doping will be permitted to compete, it will be under a neutral flag only, a significant blow to the Kremlin.
(image: Athletics Illustrated)
In your article, you state the following: "The games, which should have been boycotted by the world community after Russia's invasion of Ukraine's Crimea earlier in 2014, were a huge propaganda win for the Kremlin...." In fact, Russia didn't actually "invade" Crimea, it held a fixed, bogus referendum on March 16, 2014 which handed over control of the peninsula from Ukraine to Russia. This occurred well after the 2014 Winter Olympics (Feb. 7-23, 2014). Perhaps you are confusing this with the Ukrainian Revolution, which took place from Feb. 18-23, just as the Olympics were winding down. Many of us at the time were astonished that Putin would fritter away all the goodwill generated by the Sochi games by immediately pursuing this ham-fisted and illegal takeover of Crimea. So, when the games started, few in the West had any idea that Ukraine would go through a violent overthrow of its government or that Russia would gain control of Crimea.
ReplyDeleteAlbuquerqueDave -- We stand corrected. Thank you for catching that, and for adding historical context.
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