Alysia Montaño, an American 800-meter runner, woke up early in Valencia, California. Knowing the World Anti-Doping Agency was releasing the findings of its extraordinary inquiry into doping and corruption in Russian track and field, she devoured the details of the report in bed as soon as she awoke.
And then she began to cry.
“My hands were shaking,” she said by telephone on Monday. “Anger, sadness, relief, all of it. I just got a rush of emotions. I can’t even pinpoint all of them. At first you think of all the moments you lost, and then you feel, ‘Oh my gosh, well, thank you.’ Then you are mad. I was sweating. I just broke out in a sweat, thinking, ‘Is this real? Are they actually going to do something?’”
The answer at this deeply demoralizing point for track and field appears to be yes, and it must be yes after all the institutional rot that Dick Pound’s committee confirmed and exposed in its 323-page report.
Cover-ups of positive tests. Extortion. More than 1,400 destroyed samples. It is no wonder Pound’s independent committee has recommended Russia be suspended from track and field competition, including next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, until it proves it can play and test fair.
But for Pound to say he was surprised was quite an admission, considering that he was part of the Canadian delegation when the 100-meter champion Ben Johnson tested positive at the 1988 Olympics and later led the International Olympic Committee investigation into the Salt Lake City corruption scandal.
Montaño, still competing at age 29 after giving birth to a daughter last year, agrees with the push to ban Russia. She also believes she deserves some medals after finishing fourth in the 800 meters at the 2011 world championships, fifth in the 2012 London Olympics and fourth again at the 2013 world championships. In all those cases, she finished behind Russians who now face lifetime bans from the sport.
“Absolutely I deserve that bronze medal,” Montaño said of her Olympic race. “Even if I don’t get my podium moment, it’s still a symbol of my work and also this time in history.”
Montaño said she was convinced her Russian rivals were doping in London, and the WADA report concluded as much. It called Russia’s inaction on expeditiously dealing with flags in the biological passports of Mariya Savinova, who won the gold, and Ekaterina Poistogova, who took the bronze, “unexplained and highly suspicious.”
“When you go back and watch the race,” Montaño said, “and you see someone literally watching the race behind you, kind of jogging, and you are putting out max effort, and they kind of just walk past you, put their hands in the air and are like ‘Yay!’ and you are on the ground, huffing and puffing and about to throw up, you are like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But you can’t speak up until you have evidence. You just come off as a sour apple.”
But missing the podium in London cost her more than sleep. It cost her money. “Maybe half a million dollars, if you look at rollovers and bonuses, and that’s without outside sponsorship maybe coming in,” she said. “That’s not why you’re doing it, but you still deserve it.”
There have been too many dark times in her sport’s history, too many high-profile busts that should have solved the major doping problem for good but turned into false dawns: Johnson in 1988, or the U.S. sprinter Marion Jones and the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative in the 2000s.
You can say this for track and field: It takes down its biggest stars. The trouble is that outside prodding and enterprise are too often required.
“Obviously, it’s sad that it took a big investigative report for them to do something,” Montaño said, praising — as Pound had — a groundbreaking German television documentary by ARD that brought the Russian doping to light last year.
But what makes this round of scandal more egregious is the degree of cynicism and venality. If it is proved that Lamine Diack, who served for 16 years as president of track and field’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, did indeed demand bribes totaling more than 1 million euros in order to suppress positive doping tests, then the corruption went straight from the top to the track.
And what would make it all the more unforgivable is that Diack spent much of his mandate defending his federation’s record on anti-doping, most recently when he commandeered the microphone to make a rambling, closing remark on the subject at his farewell news conference in Beijing in August.
The French authorities, who have placed Diack under criminal investigation on suspicion of corruption and money laundering, will have the final word on his involvement. But Montaño does not sound nearly as surprised as one would expect her to be.
“I try not to think about the most negative thing, but when I heard it, I thought that sounds about right,” she said. “The IAAF is a corrupt organization. So this says everything anyone has ever assumed, if you want to use the word assumed. But it’s the truth. You can’t assume the truth.”
The question now — with the latest hurricane over and the beach covered with broken trust and debris — is how the IAAF and Russia will clean up. It seems imperative that WADA’s leadership heed the Pound committee recommendation and declare Russia noncompliant with the WADA code at its board meeting next week. It seems imperative that the IAAF act with equal alacrity to ban Russia from track and field competitions.
Sebastian Coe, who succeeded Diack as IAAF president in August, already is facing calls to step down. Coe was vice president of the IAAF for eight years before securing the top spot, and he spent many an hour in Diack’s company without — so Coe insists — the slightest inkling of Diack’s suspected criminal behavior.
“I will do whatever it will take to fix this,” Coe told Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday. “I have the full support of the sport, and I will do this.”
It is tempting, very tempting, to conclude once and for all that international sports federations have no business testing and sanctioning their own athletes, their own meal tickets. Even in a best case, the appearance of conflict still exists.
Giving a more neutral organization like WADA full responsibility for testing international-level athletes is one solution. The shift could be financed by pooling existing anti-doping resources and by increasing the money supplied by the IOC and national governments. But that tack, too, carries a risk. Who then monitors WADA?
“I think we need to look at an outside doping agency, people that aren’t related to the sport,” Montaño said. “We need someone who is a biochemist and all they are into is the lab report.”
About the Author
