In December of 2014, a German TV channel, Das Erste, released a documentary alleging that a “majority” of Russian track and field athletes—up to 99% as claimed by one whistleblower—had been illegally doping, and implicated Russian Athletics Federation (RAF) officials with covering up the abuse. The alleged scheme was simple: in exchange for 5% of an athlete’s winnings, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) would supply athletes and doctors with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), and RUSADA and the RAF would protect athletes against positive tests through a combination of tip-offs, false identities, and clean urine.
In response to the allegations, Russian and international authorities were quick to express outrage and condemn any wrongdoing. The RAF threatened legal action against what it deemed “slanderous allegations,” while the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) promised to investigate. Last month, however, Lamine Diack, the president of the IAAF, was placed under criminal investigation by French authorities for allegedly taking 200,000 Euros in bribes to cover up positive Russian doping tests, despite having previously referred to allegations of systematic doping and corruption as “a joke.”
The full scope of the scandal was substantiated in an exhaustive report issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on November 9, 2015, which not only implicated high level officials at the RAF and IAAF, but also Russian government officials in the Ministry of Sport, and even the FSB, the modern-day successor to the KGB. While doping scandals may be most commonly thought of as a few bad apples cheating to win, the WADA report made it evident that this was a full-blown state-sponsored corruption scheme that profited public officials, and as such should merit the attention of the anticorruption community.
This scandal offers several takeaways for the anticorruption community: