WHAT does the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of global track and field sports, have in common with the Nazis? According to Dmitry Kiselev, Russia’s propagandist-in-chief, they both believe in collective punishment: the Nazis “knowingly took innocents prisoner and shot them for the conduct of others”, while the IAAF last week extended a ban on Russia’s athletics federation for doping, barring the team from this summer’s Olympics. On June 21st the International Olympic Committee (IOC) upheld the ban, while leaving open the possibility that athletes who can prove they are clean might be allowed to compete.
The initial IAAF ban followed a report last year from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) that detailed a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” in Russian sport. WADA’s findings have been reinforced by whistleblowers: a former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory claims that a secret state-run programme hid drug use by Russian champions at the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi. (The Kremlin calls this “slander”.) Recent re-examinations of samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London games revealed that…
