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)
