Almost seven years after “his” Olympics in Sochi, it is yet another Olympic blow for Vladimir Poutine. Thursday, December 17, the head of the Kremlin was ostracized by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), whose new sanctions against Russia, accused of institutionalized doping, affect the symbols of the State while preserving the future of athletes.
A heavyweight in world sport, the country has been excluded for two years from international competition. Its athletes may however continue to participate individually, under a neutral banner and without a national flag. Without a hymn, therefore, in the event of a victory and a medal. And without the presence of Russian officials in the stands (president included…).
For Vladimir Poutine, who will not be able to attend any competition during these two years, the snub is more political than sporting. The head of the Kremlin had made sport one of the tools of his “soft power” to try to change the image of Russia internationally. With, four years before the World Cup, the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games.
But the beautiful story of Sochi, the seaside city by the Black Sea and at the foot of the Caucasus mountains, has turned against Moscow. Behind the perfect organization, the popular success and the deluge of Russian medals, a whole doping system had been set up. Two years later, he was reported. Generalized cheating revealed by several Russian whistleblowers, mainly Grigory Rodchenkov.
The former boss of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, a colorful and controversial figure, now a refugee in the United States, questioned institutionalized doping from 2011 to 2015 and recounted the handling of urine in Sochi. He confessed to having both perfected the performance of the athletes, with a creativity from which he derives a certain pride, and orchestrated his dissimulation, in particular thanks to the men of the Federalnaïa sloujba bezopasnosti (FSB), one of the heirs of the committee for safety of the State (KGB).
No Olympics in 2021
During the Sochi Olympics, these agents, disguised as plumbers, intervened in the control laboratory to, through a “mouse hole”, recover the samples and replace them with clean urine, stored beforehand. Faced with the scandal, the Russian authorities were then accused of having removed numerous traces of positive doping controls and introduced false messages to compromise Grigory Rodchenkov. It is this last episode which, ulcerating the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), triggered the procedure decided on Thursday by the CAS.
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