U.S. Figure Skating head wants Russia out of 2018 Winter Games

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KANSAS CITY - U.S. Figure Skating President Sam Auxier said Thursday that Russia should not be allowed to compete at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games because of the doping scandal that has enveloped the country's athletes.

Auxier added that the integrity of both the International Olympic Committee and the International Skating Union hinged on issuing a stiff penalty against the Russians.

"I mean, it's state sponsored. ... It was a huge program, well coordinated, to cheat, and they should pay a pretty stiff penalty," Auxier said during a press conference at the 2017 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. "I think the only way the IOC and the ISU maintain any level of integrity is to take a strong stand and weigh a strong penalty for those actions."

Auxier joins Sebastian Coe, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, as one of the few sports federation heads in the world to take such a strong position on the issue of Russia's Olympic participation.

In saying all Russian athletes should be excluded, Auxier even went a step further than IAAF leader Coe, who called only for Russia's track and field athletes to be banned from the Rio Summer Olympics. Only one Russian track and field athlete was allowed to compete in Rio.

No Russian figure skaters have been officially implicated in doping allegations that could involve as many as 1,000 Russian athletes in summer and winter sports, according to an independent investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

But 2014 Olympic ladies champion Adelina Sotnikova is reportedly one of 28 athletes under investigation by the IOC for a doping sample that was among those allegedly manipulated in the Russian anti-doping lab in Sochi.

The manipulation allegedly involved tampering with sample bottles to fill them with drug-free urine. Scratches on the bottles are seen as evidence of tampering, and the Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport reported that a bottle containing Sotnikova's sample had been identified as one of those with the scratches.

There is no evidence she was involved in or aware of any such tampering.

Sotnikova is the first Russian woman to win Olympic singles gold.

Should Sotnikova be banned, Gracie Gold would inherit the bronze medal, with Yu-Na Kim of South Korea getting gold and Carolina Kostner of Italy the silver.

 

Athletes save the Olympics from their leaders' big lies

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Athletes save the Olympics from their leaders' big lies

Oh, how the International Olympic Committee must yearn for the good old days of 1999, when revelations of bribes for bid city votes led to the worst scandal in the hoary (or should that be whorey?) history of the IOC.

Because as bad as that was, 2016 was even worse.

That is a painful irony given that years with an Olympics usually leave enough good recollections to wipe the seamier ones from the public memory bank.

Not so in 2016, even if the underlying point of this column, as it has been in each of the 30 years for which I have given international sports awards, still is to celebrate the best athletes in sports for whom an Olympic gold medal is the ultimate prize.

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Rot at the core threatens future of Olympics

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Rot at the core threatens future of Olympics

Sixteen years ago, when the Olympics were beset by leadership corruption, ethical laxity and doping, my perspicacious colleague Jere Longman of the New York Times suggested the possibility of the Games’ crumbling under the weight of rotten moral underpinnings.

“Future drug and corruption scandals seem inevitable. Preparations for the 2004 Summer Games in Athens remain precarious. The Olympic Games are as decayed as a bad tooth, perhaps facing permanent extraction sometime in the future,” Longman wrote in a May 17, 2000 Times story headlined, “Lack of I.O.C. Ethics Is Business as Usual.”

The Olympics may still be standing, but the rot has gotten so much worse in the past two years that it no longer seems a stretch to envision their demise.

Such a vision may be peculiar to the United States, where the much-trumpeted notions of an Olympic movement with Olympic ideals have no traction, where the coverage of Olympic-related events (and the Olympics themselves) in major media is continually shrinking, where the presence of more than one major pro sport and of all-but-pro college sports adds competition for attention that the Olympics face nowhere else in the world.

How can one have ideals when the leaders of the International Olympic Committee, notably its president, Thomas Bach, have mastered the art of moral equivocation and of what I call Candide-ism: saying all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds?

I am moved to this doom saying by events of the last few weeks involving Olympic costs and doping, the latter now known to be so pervasive as to have invalidated dozens of results from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.

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Athletes should just say no to flawed anti-doping system

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Athletes should just say no to flawed anti-doping system

Some thoughts while waiting for the lowlife Russian hackers whom Russian officials say have no ties to the government (hoo-hah!) to follow through on their announced intention to dump the next bunch of Olympians’ private medical records in an effort to convince people that athletes are doping even when they have violated no anti-doping rules...

...The overriding point in all this: as U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun has said repeatedly in recent months, the global anti-doping system is broken.

It includes unconscionable conflicts of interest, which included IOC vice-president Craig Reedie (whose IOC term ended in August) serving as WADA president.  And now the IOC dismay that the WADA-initiated McLaren report called for a ban on all Russian athletes in Rio.  Are they in this fight together or each defending a bailiwick?

The TUE regulations are just one of the many complicated, probably unworkable pieces in a well-intentioned but impossibly compromised and Sisyphean effort at doping control.

It is sad that this has led a group of ethically and morally bankrupt Russian hackers to pervert reasonable questions about flaws in the system by violating the privacy of individuals who have violated no rules.

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Who can take the IOC at its word(s) any more?

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Who can take the IOC at its word(s) any more?

The International Olympic Committee’s Sunday decision to let each sport’s international federation determine which Russian athletes will be eligible for Rio has been seen as (pick a word): shameful, fair, hypocritical, righteous. . .pass, punt & kick.

The IOC is not the only party worthy of criticism in its handling of the state-supported doping program Russia put in place after its poor performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Certainly, Russian sports officials, coaches and athletes deserve the loudest excoriation (please don’t try to tell me all these athletes were innocent pawns.)

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