I was flabbergasted after watching the sobering documentary by German investigative journalist Hajo Seppelt on the goings-on in the Russian sport system – widespread doping practices by athletes, coaches and physicians – condoned, supported and organised even, by the Russian anti-doping agency and the government itself.
My unofficial translation of the program has been posted by Athletics Illustrated here.
Not that I was particularly surprised by what I saw, as I always thought that no matter how good testing methods are, there are always human factors at play that can undermine all scientific methods to catch those who resort to using performance enhancing drugs, and I am sure this doesn’t just happen in Russia.
So how can we not feel despair about the state of high performance sport? Has much changed at all since the 1970s and 1980s? As long as anti-doping scientist are always a step behind, the political and economical stakes are so high, and corruption is part of the equation … Is there any hope at all for sport? How will all of this play out over the coming decades, with gene doping already on the horizon? In the future, will sport be more like a circus and elite athletes be more like gladiators? How will the nature of sport change?
At the moment though, it seems to me we’re all losers at some level in this sordid game of good versus evil. But it will be interesting to see whether on the basis of the evidence presented in this documentary (and much more is quite likely to come to light), the national and international sporting bodies and governments concerned will actually clean up their act, whether there will ever be consequences for those acting illegally or improperly, or whether it will all somehow be swept under the already bulging carpet, because it is all just too difficult, too commercially and politically damaging, and, not least, too dangerous.
What did take me by surprise in this documentary though was that both Vasilyi Stepanov and Yuliya Stepanova still have such an obvious passion for sport.