Banning Russia’s flag and anthem is perfect for WADA, whose only concern is optics

What the Olympics need is a clean start. By that I don't mean a "pure" start, as opposed to a "dirty" one, or any of the other uselessly simplistic terms used by the World Anti-Doping Agency to perpetuate its junk science. I mean a complete philosophical, ethical and scientific rethinking. The kind resisted by conflict-of-interest-riddled anti-doping bureaucrats, whose superficial "banning" of Russia from competition would be more meaningful if WADA was any better than, well, Russia. What you have here is a battle between crooked cops and creeps, with a lot of athletes caught in between.

To begin with, WADA has not really banned Russia from the Tokyo Games, it has merely banned its song and its flag. A melody and a swatch of cloth. Which is the perfect gesture from an organisation dedicated solely to cosmetics, and buttocks-covering. Scores of individual Russian athletes still can compete – and rightly so, given that they may have been non-complicit, or victimised by a state-sponsored system, or simply unwitting violators of a nonsensical banned list bereft of any scientific worth. WADA is not fit to sort out the guilty from the bystanders. It's just another bad actor.

More importantly, it is a tainted instrument, the results and judgments of which cannot be trusted. No one can be happy with Russia's conduct – state doping is a human rights scourge – but WADA is simply not a legitimate adjudicator. It was never designed by the International Olympic Committee to go after powerful states, or state-sanctioned apparatus such as the US Olympic Committee, which presided over a child molestation coverup that makes Russian doping look benign. The IOC founded WADA purposely to focus guilt on individual athletes, and shift attention away from guilty governing bodies.

Russia's latest supposed transgression was to send "manipulated" or incomplete lab data to the doping agency. How is that very different from WADA's own unethical conduct over its repeated lab failures? Or false-guilt travesties such as the meldonium controversy?

"It should be obvious that if anti-doping regulations are to work, they have to be evidence-based and based in science, and follow due process," said Roger Pielke, a University of Colorado scientist and author of, The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.

WADA fails on all three counts, with a broad and growing "body of evidence of sloppy science and questionable quality control" according to Pielke. There is the case of Erik Tysse, a Norwegian racewalker who was penalised in 2011 for using an EPO-like substance. A team of Norwegian scientists have since documented that the data from WADA lab in Rome "lacked rigor, quality and reproductibility" and, more importantly, that WADA presented manipulated images of a urine test during the appeals phase, which seemed calculated to look more guilty.

There was the Saudi Arabian soccer player Alaa Al-Kowaibki, wrongly convicted by a WADA lab notorious for erroneous readings, who served a year suspension and lived with the tar of "doper" on his record for six years until 2017, because WADA didn't bother to correct the record, even though it knew it was a false result.

WADA is not fit to sort out the guilty from the bystanders. It's just another bad actor.

The Irish sprinter Steven Colvert was banned in 2014 though multiple experts found the WADA lab's reading of recombinant EPO in his urine so bizarre that it must have resulted from sheer incompetence. When Colvert asked that his samples be re-tested given the conflicting findings, he found they'd been destroyed.

The nonsense goes on and on. More than a dozen of WADA's 35 labs have been suspended or lost accreditation because of bad work.

Before you damn Russia, consider how WADA wreaked such reputational havoc over meldonium with no cause. More than 300 substances are on WADA's banned list, and "there is very little evidence for performance-enhancement for most of them," according to Pielske.

Meldonium is one of them, a heart medication that landed on the list via mere rumour and suspicion because Eastern European athletes were apparently using it en masse. Doctors in that part of the world believe heavy training does potential heart damage. There is not a shred of evidence that meldonium provides a performance benefit; on the contrary, doping experts such as Don Catlin say it has zero effect. Yet more than 100 athletes, many of them Russian, were branded dopers by WADA, based on nothing at all.

This is not science. Science is systematic, rigorous, empirical, observational, transparent, evidence-based, and procedurally sound, with conclusions double-checked. This is a mess.

This spring, Pielke and colleague Erik Boye of Oslo University published a summary of the mess in an academic paper, Scientific Integrity and Anti-Doping Regulation in the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics. They wrote: "In the absence of reliable evidence, decision-making often becomes arbitrary, inconsistent and irreproducible, which threatens the integrity of anti-doping decision-making, the due process rights of athletes and the sustainability of anti-doping efforts."

In place of this mess, imagine what would happen if we did the following: (1) declared a period of total amnesty during which a panel of fully independent scientists re-evaluated WADA's absurd list and its shoddy problematic laboratories; and (2) conducted a full-immunity survey of athletes as to what they take, when, and why, and what deterrence methods they find effective and would like to see in place to regulate themselves and their peers.

This would not please the moralising careerists who push anti-doping's corrupt dead-end system, such as the US Anti-Doping Agency's Travis Tygart, whose attitude has long been, "When in doubt, punish the innocent". WADA and USADA need lots of guilty parties in order to justify their jobs and budgets.

But it actually might get us somewhere in persuading young people not to take stuff.

The fundamental lack of scientific scruple at WADA (and its subsidiaries) can be seen in a simple fact: It has never published a doping-prevalence study. Prevalence data is critical for any evidence-based understanding of the problem: How many athletes are using performance-enhancers and are WADA methods working? We don't know, and neither does WADA, because it doesn't ask, or when it does, it conveniently buries inconvenient data. "It's willful ignorance," Pielke said.

Example: back in 2011, it funded anonymous surveys at two elite track and field events. Those surveys showed that 57 per cent of the athletes admitted to using a banned substance in the previous 12 months. WADA blocked the release of the results for years, perhaps understandably, because the numbers suggested that WADA's very profitable testing system isn't working – at all. Only about one to two per cent of WADA tests are positive. All the rest go uncaught. In other words, WADA may be failing at a better than 50-1 pace.

Without good science and real data, all WADA is doing is "a lot of shadow-chasing," Pielke said. It's just a lot of meaningless arm-waving with flags.

The Washington Post

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