Four years after narrowly missing the final of the 1500 meter run at the London Olympics, Hilary Stellingwerff is getting a second chance in Rio.
But if every runner in the 2012 race was competing with integrity, Stellingwerff shouldn’t have needed a second chance in the first place. Since the end of the 2012 Olympics, six out of the 12 runners in that final, including the gold and silver medalists, were discovered to have been doping.
Doping in sports is a complicated issue, and it has been around almost as long as sport has existed. However, a formal ban on performance-enhancing substances has only been enforced since 1967, after British cyclist Tommy Simpson died from the effects of amphetamines while competing in the Tour de France. In response to Simpson’s death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) mandated doping tests for all athletes competing in the Olympics from 1968 forward.
Doping continued to be a hot-button issue as time went on, and the list of banned substances ballooned as scientists and medical professionals learned about different chemical’s effects and discovered effective ways to test for them. Prior to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the international sporting community put its collective foot down and formed the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The WADA has a stringent set of guidelines and is a governing body partially run through the IOC to hold countries and athletes accountable.
Unfortunately, the creation of WADA has not stopped doping from happening and has robbed deserving athletes like Stellingwerff, a 2004 UW graduate who represents Canada, of chances to compete fairly. In Stellingwerff’s 2012 race, only four out of the six athletes who were caught with banned substances received some kind of suspension, and of those four, only gold medalist Asli Cakir Alptekin of Turkey had her title stripped.
Much of the lack of punishment and uneven enforcement is due to the unnecessarily complicated reporting system that WADA has in place, as well as the lack of compliance from national anti-doping federations and labs. Most notably, WADA shut down a lab in Rio de Janeiro, the site of this summer’s Olympics, less than two months before the games were scheduled to begin due to purported tampering and noncompliance issues.
Many athletes and sports enthusiasts alike have expressed discontent over the issues with WADA, especially the closure of the lab in Rio, stating fears that the integrity of the Olympics is being compromised for those who have worked hard and competed cleanly.
The lengths of many athletes’ suspensions and the likelihood these athletes will commit a repeated offense are also concerning. For instance, Cakir Alptekin served a two-year suspension for using methenolone, an anabolic steroid, in 2004, but used another illegal substance starting in 2010. She was able to continue competing due to the convoluted nature of the reporting process, and was not handed down a suspension, this time for eight years, until August 2015.
If athletes who have already received doping suspensions from their national federations continue to be allowed in international competition, it raises the obvious question as to whether they will offend again – and in many recent cases this has occurred.
In one of the biggest recent cases, Russian swimmer Yulia Efimova tested positive for meldonium, a drug that increases blood flow that was banned by WADA earlier this year. She purportedly began using it in 2015, almost immediately after she had finished a 16-month suspension for using a banned anabolic steroid. Efimova, who trains in the United States, was reinstated by FINA, the international swimming governing body, and is listed to compete on the Russian roster in Rio. Efimova claimed that she took the drug before it was banned, so she was reinstated on a technicality.
Efimova’s situation is an aberration, but it is one that raises the concern of the ethics of the whole Olympic movement and international sport in general. In recent Olympics, some medal ceremonies, especially in the individual sports, appear to be just for show due to the amount of athletes who are later caught doping. If the lab in Rio is not up to par by Aug. 6, the first day of competition, we could see a lot more medals taken away after the games. Furthermore, athletes like Stellingwerff will continue to get robbed of the chance to perform in the later stages of competition. If this is how far backward the integrity of international sport has moved in the four years since London, the values of the Olympic movement and international sport federations should be seriously questioned.
