Russia Sports News:

At the Olympics, special services are playing out the Cold War, by Andrey Rezchikov and Ainura Alieva for VZGLYAD. 17.02.2022.

Kamila Valieva managed to defend the gold medal won in the team tournament only in the sports court. And as a result of doping scandals after the Sochi Olympics, the Russians lost about 50 medals, but 45 have already been returned through the courts. Athletes and political scientists are sure that big sport has become an instrument of pressure on Russia. But if the Games are used in a dishonest political game, then what is the point for us to participate in them?

“Most Russians believe that judges at the Beijing Olympics are biased towards our athletes,” Mikhail Mamonov, head of VTsIOM's political analysis practice, said on Thursday. Judging by the results of a recent telephone survey, more than 55% do not trust the opinion of Olympic judges, and only 23% consider refereeing to be unbiased, the sociologist said. Mamonov shared the research data at the round table “Oh, sport is not peace. How the Olympics is becoming a theater of information wars, which was organized by the Expert Institute for Social Research (EISI).

Most of the survey participants perceive accusations and suspicions against our athletes precisely as an element of an information attack on Russia, Mamonov stated. Speaking about one of the most scandalous episodes of the 2022 Olympics - the doping accusations of Kamila Valieva - the sociologist said that 62% of the Russians surveyed clearly believe that the anti-doping agency is behaving biased.

Recall that in the midst of the Beijing Olympics, the International Anti-Doping Agency unexpectedly reported that Valieva's test almost two months ago (before the championship in St. Petersburg) gave a positive result for the drug trimetazidine. Due to this situation, the awards ceremony for the winners of the team tournament was cancelled. And although all charges against the athlete were dropped by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and Valiyeva was allowed to participate in the individual tournament at the Olympics, the IOC Executive Committee then announced that if the skater wins a medal in the individual championship, then the awards ceremony will not take place in this case. As a result, Camila, who had previously been in the lead, fell twice on Thursday in the free program and ended up in only fourth place.

“She withstood such pressure. Do not let the child sleep at night because of these words, drag her everywhere, the press ... She was simply broken psychologically. These people broke the child, ”said Irina Slutskaya, two-time world champion in figure skating, Olympic medalist, on the Russia-1 channel.

Anton Shipulin, another participant of the EISI round table, the 2017 biathlon world champion, and now the deputy head of the Duma Committee for Physical Education and Sports, spoke about how they psychologically affect Russian athletes:

“To put pressure on the part of the sport, of course, is the easiest. As a former athlete and now as a statesman, I understand more and more the tools that some states use to suppress our country.”

Shipulin, we recall, was deprived of two medals won at the Olympic Games in Vancouver and Sochi. And we are talking about team competition and unsubstantiated accusations against only one biathlete - Evgeny Ustyugov, because of which the members of the entire team are left without awards. According to Shipulin, "Russia is deliberately beaten."

He gave examples of how Russian Olympians were accused of substituting samples, adding salt to tests, and destroying test databases. However, the very procedure for passing the analysis, when the athlete, in the presence of representatives of the anti-doping agency, “lowers his pants to the knee and lifts his T-shirt so that everyone can see how you fill the jar”, ​​excludes the possibility for the athlete to do anything with this analysis. And for everything that happens with this jar, the anti-doping agency, and not the athlete, is responsible, the deputy stressed.

“My friend Alexander Legkov went through a very thorny path, and he had to win a medal twice: the first time in the Olympic marathon itself, the second time in the courts,” Shipulin said.

Legkov himself, an Olympic champion in the 50-kilometer ski marathon, and now a deputy of the Moscow City Duma of the VII convocation, recalled how he defended his name and achievement in court at the Sochi Games. The athlete managed to win the lawsuit and prove that he did not use doping.

The champion explained that at that time he had been training for four years in Davos and was under the constant supervision of various international inspection authorities. This was useful to him later to prove his innocence. He saved the results of all tests in a separate folder, where in total more than 150 documents with detailed information were accumulated, where and when each doping test was taken.

“I did not comment on the media. I knew for sure that if I started talking - no matter what - it would be taken as an excuse. Therefore, it was necessary to fight in European courts, in CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport). I managed to do this because I had an army of my friends and acquaintances, relatives, relatives, European coaches with me. It was only in the legal field that it was possible to fight back, telling and showing your story with examples,", said Legkov.

In addition to doping agencies, American legislation is now also putting pressure on athletes, said Alexander Asafov, a political scientist and columnist for the Moskva Speaks radio station. He recalled that after the Sochi Olympics, the so-called Rodchenkov Law appeared in the United States (named after the ex-director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who fled to the United States). This document allows you to punish any person suspected of violating anti-doping rules at competitions where American athletes, sponsors or broadcasters took part, and also has an extraterritorial nature. This means that the US authorities have the right to prosecute any citizen of any country in the world for violations in any territory. It is worth noting that threats have already been made against Kamila Valieva - the head of USADA, Travis Tygart, said

At the same time, the political scientist says, the West is actively facilitating the possibility of winning competitions for its athletes, including in rather unconventional ways: the IOC has already issued a set of recommendations for sports federations on the participation of transgender people in competitions - those who have changed their sex, or simply consider themselves people of another gender.

“A man, having a great physiological advantage, can compete with women. This is the official position of the IOC, “A man, having a great physiological advantage, can compete with women. This is the official position of the IOC, Asafov pointed out. Western countries are demonstratively fighting for “fair sport”, looking for traces of doping from competitors, but they consider such a head start for “men who have realized themselves as women” to be the norm, the expert noted.

Anton Shipulin also spoke about double standards in sports. “Aleksey Volkov trained with me in recent years - he was really asthmatic and allergic and left the training camp when flowering began, because he was suffocating. But he could not officially obtain permission to use drugs for asthma and allergies. And some of the Western athletes use these drugs. If we are talking about equal sport, about equal rights, about strict selection criteria for the Olympic Games and World Championships, let's apply the same rules to everyone,” he said.

Anton Shipulin, apparently, had in mind the athletes from Norway. Last year, the president of the Russian Ski Racing Federation, Elena Vyalbe, together with coach Yuri Borodavko, actually accused Norwegian skiers in plain text of specifically providing medical documents in order to gain access to prohibited pharmacology.

The last real Olympics, perhaps, were the Winter Games in Sochi in 2014, says Alexei Martynov, director of the International Institute of Recent States. “Everything that happened afterwards cannot be called a holiday. The games have turned into competitions for large pharmaceutical companies,” the political scientist pointed out.

At the last Olympic Games, anti-doping agencies challenged 50 medals, and in the end it turns out that about 45 were returned through the courts. This is a competition of lawyers, and the athletes are somehow on the sidelines here.

Most Russians don't know the medals were returned, Martynov said, "but everyone knows they were taken away." “This is an information war at the level of special services. And the athletes are just participants in this performance and completely powerless people, ”the expert complained.

Turning to the Olympic champion Legkov, Martynov noted that he did not even know about the victory that the athlete won in court. "I think the vast majority of people - 99.99% - just did not hear that he managed to defend his honor in these humiliating courts," the expert suggested.

“I understand the logic of athletes and officials who persuade – we must win, our spirit cannot be broken,” said Martynov. At the same time, he asked himself the question: “But is it necessary to persuade yourself to participate in someone else's ugly performance? After all, for our money we get a huge amount of negativity, they scoff at us, over the whole country.”

“We must participate,” objected Gleb Kuznetsov, head of the EISI Expert Council. The political scientist recalled how, during the Cold War, the two powers fought on the Olympic fields, world championships, at the chessboard.

“All these doping scandals, which are becoming more and more, and the tragedy of our team after the stellar Olympics in Sochi for us, are attempts to exclude Russia from the elite club of great powers, to finish the cold war.”

In such a situation, refusing to speak, the expert emphasized, means “pouring water on the enemy’s mill and fixing their victory completely and irrevocably.” Another function of doping scandals, Kuznetsov added, is to demonstrate the "fundamental depravity of Russians." “The great champion Legkov really showed how hard it is to win the same medal twice. But that means you need to have twice as much energy and win the same medal two, five or more times to prove that the Russian spirit cannot be broken", Kuznetsov suggested.