ONLY a naive sports fan would be shocked by a new round of doping allegations. In cycling’s Tour de France from 1998-2013, 38% of the top-ten finishers were punished for using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), and a leak of track-and-field athletes’ blood test results earlier this year showed that around one-seventh were “highly suggestive of doping”. Yet the report on Russian athletes published on November 9th by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) still represents a new kind of scandal—or, more precisely, a very old one. Rather than merely citing individual athletes, WADA claims that Russia has maintained an organised national doping programme of the sort that was thought to have ended with the cold war.
Russia first found itself in WADA’s cross-hairs last December, when a German TV station aired accusations of rampant PED use. In June the agency noted that Russia led the world in PED violations in 2013, with 11.5% of the global total. But once its investigators started digging, what they found was “worse than we thought,” said Dick Pound, the report’s co-author and a former WADA president. “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”…
