World Anti-Doping Agency: Russia Should be Banned from the 2016 Olympics
 

http://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/34765444

http://espn.go.com/olympics/trackand...field-athletes

After a long investigation, WADA just released a shocking report today accusing the Russian Federation of running a huge state-sponsored doping scheme, including helping their athletes avoid detection in drug testing. They named 10 Russian athletes and coaches who should be banned for life, and given how corrupt Russia apparently is and the little amount of time remaining to the next olympic games, they also recommend that the IOC ban Russia from competing in Rio. (Not sure if the recommendation is just Russia's track and field team, or all of their athletes)

The IOC is not obligated to agree to the recommendation, but there's pressure all over the world on the IOC to hammer Russia.

That's nice. It's Russia. We'll sweep it under the rug and carry on with life.

I mean, this isn't shocking at all. It's probably fully endorsed by Putin. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would get involved in crap like this.

Skimming through the report, this part is amazing/hilarious. One thing Russia was doing is having test samples sent to a small lab on the outskirts of Moscow to quickly check, any that were positive got dumped or "lost", and any samples which were clean got re-sealed and sent on to the WADA lab.

Also, when samples were in the possession of anti-doping officials who were not already corrupt, they were often intimidated, bullied, or bribed. Russian police got involved if necessary.

The more things change....

USADA and many European anti-doping commissions also want Russia to be banned from competition.

The IOC is going to defer to the IAAF (who I guess runs track and field) for now. The IAAF is giving Russia until the end of the week to explain themselves.

edit: haha, wow. Last year alone, Russia intentionally destroyed 1,417 samples that WADA had asked them to save for further analysis.

I will break you...

Not sure the US has any ground to stand on considering the number of sprinters that have been caught doping.

The US is doing very well given recent stats.

In 2013, despite the fact that Russia was helping their athletes evade detection, they still had far more failed tests (225, 11.5% of all failed tests) than any other nation. (Turkey #2, France #3) The USA is 11th on the list with 43 (2.2% of all failed tests), which given how many athletes we have is great.

We have no moral high ground here.

What exactly do you mean by this? If you are saying we are in no position to object to a massive state-sponsored doping scheme, then thats a big pile of moral equivalency bullshit. Any country as large as ours with the vast number of athletes we have are always going to have a couple athletes go rogue, and a few careless knuckleheads who don't bother checking labels and assume their supplements are fine. Objectively speaking, we're pretty clean.

Russia's expected response: "They're lying".

Pretty much their response for everything they get accused of.

Every country has dopers in athletics. Some countries just feign to give more of a shit about that fact than others.