Ian O’Riordan: No way can the Russians be let near Rio

If only there was some way of placing a secret recording device inside the top-floor suite of the Grand Hotel Wien in Vienna next Friday. There, after seven months of complete craziness, the IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, must decide whether or not the Russians get to compete in the Rio Olympics.

Hang on. There’s every chance someone has placed a secret recording device inside that suite. Given all that’s unravelled since last November, nothing would come as a surprise. Power, greed, corruption, bribery and revenge have a way of getting to where they need to be, and whatever Sebastian Coe, the IAAF president, says to his colleagues may soon be insider knowledge. Or rather already is.

For now, we can only guess. Everything up to this point has come out as the chaotic truth, or else as a total sham, which either way should make the IAAF’s decision an absolute given. No way can the Russians be let anywhere near Rio, but of course that doesn’t mean they won’t. There’s no such thing as a straightforward decision when it comes to deciding the fate of the ninth most populated country in the world, and, in their view at least, the second most powerful.

What is certain is that Coe and his colleagues at the IAAF better have some black Austrian coffee to hand next Friday as they shift through the evidence of the last seven months. It’s enough to make a 10-part Netflix series, Making a Doper-er, such is the increasingly incredulous back story and careening sequence of events since the IAAF first suspended the Russian athletics federation, back on November 13th.

That came four days after Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), told a small band of journalists at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Geneva that the Russian athletics federation had essentially “sabotaged” the 2012 London Olympics, such was their “widespread inaction” against athletes with suspiciously obvious doping profiles. ‘Culture if cheating’ “It’s worse than we thought,” said Pound, a man who usually fears for the worst when it comes to doping. He’d chaired the Wada Independent Commission which produced a 323-page report where, among other things, they identified “a deeply rooted culture of cheating” in Russian athletics, and, by likely extension, in other sports too.

What the IAAF didn’t realise (or at least admit) was Pound’s fears were actually mild compared to the reality about to unfold. As the plot thickened, so did the hopeless comparisons with some of the finest crime writers of our day, although the truth soon became stranger than fiction. So too grew the cast of shady characters, not all of whom lived to tell their tale.

So for the IAAF, the challenge of bringing Russia back in line with everybody else – in appearances, at least – became immeasurably greater as each new chapter unfolded. Rune Anderson, a Norwegian anti-doping expert, headed up their five-person task force charged with restoring some level of credibility within Russian athletics, which, among a long list of conditions, “must not jeopardise the integrity of international competitions”. Anyone with even a casting glance over this story will know their appearance in Rio will do exactly that.

Anderson is the man who will ultimately sway Coe and his colleagues one way or the other, and has dropped some hints that “progress has been made”. In March, the IAAF agreed to give Russia more time to make further progress, again without realising – or admitting – their worst fears were only beginning. By now those last seven months must feel like an eternity.

Original whistleblowers First, Hajo Seppelt presented another instalment of his documentary series Doping – Top Secret on German TV, claiming certain Russian coaches continued to work with athletes, despite serving doping bans. Then, the Stepanovas resurfaced, Vitaly and wife Yuliya, the original whistleblowers, who told CBS 60 Minutes that Russia’s doping problem was worse than even Wada suggested, particularly when it came to the smoke and mirror doping controls at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Then, enter Grigory Rodchenkov, the man in charge of doping in Sochi, who backed up everything the Stepanovas had said, only in more gory detail, in his 3,200-word interview with the New York Times. Just this week, Seppelt was back on air, implicating Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko in yet further doping allegations, this time surrounding football.

With that it became a finger-pointing exercise of Olympic proportions, some blaming Wada for letting things get so bad, although they claimed their hands were tied, while others questioned the motivations of those on both sides, not just Rodchenkov, but also the Stepanovas, considering the main reason Yuliya agreed to blow her whistle in the first place is because she herself was caught doping. It’s implausible that everyone is telling the truth, if indeed anyone is.

Still, the Russians deserve some credit for trying to clean up their act, even if that was hiring Burson-Marsteller, the US public relations giant, who specialise in defending vilified reputations (such as Philip Morris tobacco). Russia also invited select members of the international media to visit some facilities in Moscow, the only problem there being one of their athletes, 400m runner Tatyana Firova, ended up asking Sky News “why can’t we take drugs?” or some words to that effect.

So, no way can the Russians be let anywhere near Rio, but even if the IAAF agrees to agree next Friday, that doesn’t mean they won’t. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has called a “stakeholders summit”, for four days later, in Lausanne, and there’s no need for any secret device to record what will be said in there.