2022 Winter Olympics Dispatch #2
A Russian doping at the Winter Olympics. Shocker. Also, a modern pentathlon update and the Rams win the Super Bowl.
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.
Kamila Valieva
15 year old Russian figure skater, Kamila Valieva, is the story right now. Valieva absolutely obliterated the competition last year and came into these Olympics as heavy favourite. She tested positive late in 2021 but due to the slowness of the testing lab, was allowed to compete at Beijing, contribute to Russia’s teams medal winning performance before the results of the A sample came to light. A ruling from CAS has resulted in her provisional suspension being lifted and she’s free to compete. She’s obviously under a cloud and the IOC has determined that there will be no medal ceremonies for her events moving forward.
This individual incident of doping itself is somewhat immaterial to the thrust of this newsletter, although more on that later, but there’s a number of higher level angles to consider.
Firstly, Valieva’s life is probably going to be ruined by this incident and the blame can be laid at everyone’s feet: from the people immediately around her who absolutely do not have her best interests at heart and allowed this to happen; to the national domestic systems that create Russian athletic heroes for political ends; to the global system that demands people be crushed into whatever shape capitalism requires to generate dollars.
Oh wait, she is currently leading the invidual event after the short program. Never mind.
Secondly, I think the IOC would very much rather she not be there but has declined to throw the sports judicial process out the window to achieve that end. As far as the rules are concerned (for what that’s worth) she’s free to compete. By refusing to have medal ceremonies where is she is overwhelmingly likely to feature, the IOC are more or less doing the only thing in their power to avoid the PR black eye that CAS and the slow doping lab has set them up for.
The alternatives are overruling CAS - which the IOC won’t do because they want to use CAS for their own ends in the future - or hoping the ROC does the right thing and pulls her from the competition, which is laughable. On the other hand, if we can’t celebrate our winners, we may as well pack it in. Sometimes following the rule of law results in a tough situation but I won’t be crying any tears in sympathy for the Olympiac gasbags.
Secondly, China is somewhat of a winner here. The sports media, with its ability to only really focus on one thing at a time, like a hyperactive dog, has moved on from the handwringing about those sneaky Chinese with their sportswashing to handwringing about those dirty Russians with their doping, as if the world can be explained in terms of an early-80s Cold War action movie, easily divisible into goodies and baddies1. Then everyone will forget about it before anything really meaningful happens.
Thirdly, and speaking of handwringing, I am increasingly becoming a pearl clutcher about children competing in high level international events, whether it be figure skating, gymnastics or skateboarding. It can’t be good for them - witness how much actual adults struggle2 - and there’s a whole Olympics set aside for them with considerably less spotlight attached to it.
Moreover, if people under sixteen are protected and given more leeway under the doping code, which seems to be the case, then they aren't really playing by the same rules. While that's for their own protection, the senior level requires the application of zero tolerance (again, for what that is worth). If it means having slightly more mature but less athletically primed gymnasts or skateboarders at the Olympics and not psychicly destroying as many young people in the process of generating billions of dollars of ad revenue for skeezy old men in boardrooms in the US and Switzerland, then I think that’s a fair trade off.
To this act of doping, the contamination explanation is as old as time. Taking the cynical but often correct view that this is a lie, the purpose is to not convince people that she’s clean (although if that happens, then great) but to provide a sufficiently plausible explanation to cast enough doubt on the positive test that it will either be thrown out during the appeals process or at least in courts of public opinion. Surely any action taken against Valieva, irrespective of the rules or truth, will be welcome grist for the political mill for nationalists in Russia.
To the broader culture around doping, a semi-common refrain I hear is that we shouldn’t care who dopes and that professional athletes should be allowed to do what they want. Part of that attitude arises from a conflation of the ceaseless War on Drugs and the gradual, snail’s pace elimination of prohibtion, and doping in sports, because both fall under the banner of “drugs” and are - more or less - victimless crimes.
They are, as should be apparent with a few seconds of thought, quite different. There’s a substantial difference between someone who wants to party or someone who’s down on their luck and looking for a temporary escape, and elite athletes using medication to further enhance their performance.
Doping is a huge waste of resources. EPO, to take an example that I’m familiar with, that should be going to the chronically ill is manufactured and diverted so a multi-millionaire cyclists can try to gain an edge on another multi-millionaire cyclist. I can’t think of a greater waste of talent than taking doctors and scientists, with all their training, skill and knowledge, and deploying them to develop increasingly complex doping regiments for elite athletes. They could be helping people who need it, instead of people who want it for their own professional ends.
Then, at what point on the junior pathways are PEDs introduced, assuming that the default view is not that we should be juicing children with experimental drugs with unknown long term side effects for our entertainment? Valieva is a child and she cannot be reasonably expected to make an informed decision about what medication to take and what not to take. It is very likely that many of the doctors are not entirely sure about what they’re doing as well.
Athletes are often used as guinea pigs and the horrific tales of the early days of EPO abuse are the result. Top Tour de France contenders had to wake up in the middle of the night to get on a trainer to raise their heart rate and avoid their sludge-like blood from stopping their heart from beating. Young men died and while this was largely in the same stupid senseless way that plenty of people have died in sport but it was also entirely avoidable. The ideal is that we all go home from our jobs at the end of the day.
It would be nice if clean sport was one thing - one I think is worth holding on to - that wasn’t stripped away in the inevitable arms race, eliminating the last remaining inefficiencies in the system for nebulous gains, wins and the attendant money and prestige. I don’t hold high hopes. The governing bodies’ incentive is to obfuscate and cover-up, than it is to maintain a strict zero tolerance policy because that is hard and lots of famous people like to cheat. Even if the governing bodies can never actually get in front of the problem and are always playing catch up, but that also doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
While I sympathise with the argument that doping is considered necessary to deal with the superhuman efforts expected of athletes as part of their jobs, that is an argument in favour of reducing the toll on athletes, not of loosening restrictions on doping. At a certain point, if you need this level of medical intervention, maybe you should just stop.
I don’t expect you personally to hold it against athletes if they cheat. I waver from a mild “that’s not right” to a shrug, depending on who it is and how tired I am, but also through many years of desensitisation to the topic3. Cheating is part of the human fabric that makes up all sport and that’s what makes it interesting but it also doesn’t make it right.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Sometimes the grace and beauty part of this segment is ironic but sometimes the grace and beauty is just pure devastation. Those of us at home feast on the highs and the lows.
#ModernPentathlonWatch
Moving away from my rapidly diminishing interest in the Winter Olympics4 and its lack of a constant stream of content and slightly inconvenient timing5:
Rams win the Super Bowl
You don’t need a recap of the game. There are millions of them out there and that is not the point of this newsletter. There are two interesting things that might arise out of this singular result.
In the short term, this is a victory for actually trying to win things. The Rams went all in this year and traded away anything that could be traded for assets to help them win right now. Too many American sports teams are hooked on managing the future, through draft picks and cap or payroll management and tanking, than to stake everything on winning now. This attitude is tiresome because it means half the league is just making up the numbers and not even trying to be effective. I hope this is a turning point for them.
In the long term, it’ll be interesting to see what this means for the LA sports-scape.
LA is not a football town to a cliche but the Rams, Lakers and Dodgers have all won their most recent titles in the last couple of years, taking the best sports city in America title from Tampa Bay and before that, Boston. Even the Kings won a Stanley Cup in the last decade. Of course, this is all in stark contrast to the Clippers, Chargers and Angels, who have practically won dick all.
For the Rams, there is plenty of competition for sports spending already6 and it may be the Super Bowl win was the minimum required to stay relevant, rather than being a key to elevate them above the rest. Whether this results in a growing proportion of Rams fans at home games or if they will always feel like road games, remains to be seen.
Speaking English as a first language makes you a goodie.
Ranging from Naomi Osaka’s refusal to participate in media rituals last year, to Peng Shuai’s disappearance, to Eileen Gu’s borderline robotic PR training synthesised with a curious blend of Chinese and American right wing bootstrap sentiments.
They’ve at least had the opportunity to develop coping mechanisms and the latter might be worth it if we have to watch hardcore Republican voters try to cogntiviely process a Chinese-American dual citizen running for their presidential nomination in another twenty years.
(I also didn’t mean to pick exclusively Asian women as examples but they are probably three of the most famous women in sport right now and what, I’m supposed to talk about Tom Brady’s struggles instead? That motherfucker got enough air time)
Putting biathlon and short track in the same category as handball, in that I'll watch it if it happens to be on and there's nothing better on offer but I won't seek it out.
There are times in the evening when there is literally no live sports occuring. I thought that the whole point of the Olympics was to bathe in a unceasing stream of stuff happening.
Just as a bonus, USC football is getting a good coach that should see them return to the fore of the Pac-12, if not the national conversation.