When the World Anti-Doping Agency was created in 1999, its mission was to restore credibility in global sports after doping revelations at the previous year’s Tour de France.
Mission unaccomplished.
Though the agency last week barred Russian track and field athletes from the Olympic Games in Rio this summer, it spent years trying to avoid a confrontation with Russia despite receiving insistent calls for intervention not only from a prominent Russian athlete but from the nation’s chief anti-doping official.
Meanwhile, WADA, as the agency is known, chews up $2 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money — out of a $28 million budget — to pursue its actual mission: safeguarding the International Olympic Committee from financial setbacks due to fallout among donors over athletic contests tainted by use of performance-enhancing drugs.
In the past year, news organizations in Germany, England and the U.S., notably the Daily Mail in London and the New York Times, documented the breadth of doping in international sports. As this coverage reveals, WADA wasn’t just asleep at the wheel; it was determined to drive in the wrong direction.
Until it goes after doping with resolve, one of the most celebrated sports events in the world will remain under a cloud.
WADA’s current president, Craig Reedie, has hobbled his agency’s own late-to-the-game efforts to investigate doping. He wrote an email last year to the office of the Russian sports minister to assure the country “there is no action being taken by WADA that is critical of the efforts that I know have been made, or are being made, to improve antidoping efforts in Russia.”
Fifteen years into its existence, WADA’s president was more concerned about protecting an Olympics nation than restoring credibility to the Games. Reedie’s note, obtained and published by the Daily Mail, came two and a half years after a female Russian discus thrower contacted WADA to plead for help, saying that while competing in the 2012 London Olympics she had been directed by Russian officials to take performance-enhancing drugs.
Darya Pishchalnikova was blowing the whistle on her own silver medal. “I want to cooperate with WADA,” she wrote in English.
The agency’s response? It forwarded the email to Russian sports officials, who four months later barred Pishchalnikova from competition for 10 years, ending her career.
The depth of Russia’s state-sanctioned cheating was made plain, finally, in a 323-page WADA report last November that focused on track and field athletes. The report neglected to cite Pishchalnikova’s cry for help, or the agency’s failure to take her up on her vow (“I have proof,” she had written) to expose the Russian sports ministry’s systematic manipulation of urine samples.
Reedie’s first duty, it appears, has been to the International Olympic Committee, which he serves as a vice president, as well as leading WADA.
That dual role has left the Games vulnerable to deception and tarnished their results. It is deeply unfair to athletes who embody the Olympic spirit and refuse to cheat.
When WADA was launched, its charter did not spell out an investigative purpose. That was likely not an oversight. It wasn’t until 2011, in the face of persistent evidence of doping that the agency hired its first investigator — one man to chase cheaters across the entire world.
It took two more years for it to amend its code to authorize investigative work, but pushed the start date of that to 2015. In 2014 it tapped an outside investigative team, 5 Stones Intelligence, to take a serious look at Russian cheating — which produced last November’s damning report.
Amid these signs of progress, Reedie has shown little interest in holding violators accountable, recently telling a New York Times reporter, “We’re not going to turn to people and say, ‘These are the rules; obey them.’”
You read that right.
Reedie’s term as president of WADA expires at the end of this year. Expect the I.O.C. to steer another apologist into his chair. Too much money is at stake to let the World Anti-Doping Agency live up to its name.