For awhile I was worried that the International Olympic Committee had grown a spine and integrity. You may remember that they dropped the hammer on the Russian Olympic team after discovering widespread cheating on drug tests. You and I probably think that banning a country from participating means that athletes from that country would not be at the Winter Olympics that just opened in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
But you and I are not members of the International Olympic Committee. The Pyeonchang games will not have a Russian flag, nor will the Russian national anthem be heard. But 168 Russian athletes will be competing as "Olympic Athletes from Russia," because they won their cases with the Court of Arbitration in Sport that they can't be proven to have cheated.
As the writer of the story notes, one of the features of the Russian scheme to foil the World Anti-Doping Agency's tests makes it tough to find evidence that would prove any cheating happened.
It's nice to know things are back to normal: Some of the world's best athletes compete against other great athletes and have great stories, for a few the dream turns into reality as they stand tallest to receive their honors.
And down in the sewers, the people who run this show line their own wallets under cover of those dreams and dreamers. I sometimes wonder that they can stand their own stench.
2 comments:
I suspect that, like almost any person who winds up in a position of power and then abuses it for their own gain, they have convinced themselves they somehow deserve it because they are "special" or whatever. Feh. (And sadly, any time there is power to be abused, there are people willing to abuse it)
No doubt -- at least, those that didn't start out with the idea of bilking the system for whatever they could get, anyway.
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