The last time Spanish Formula One driver Fernando Alonso clambered the podium at the end of a grand prix was during 2013 – at the time he was still cloaked in Ferrari's rosso corsa. Two years later Alonso moved across to the McLaren team on a contract that earns the two-time world champion a base annual salary of $53 million. That is roughly equal to the reported annual revenue of the whole Essendon Football Club.
'Corrupted the Olympics': The Russian team at the London Olympics.
Photo: APAccording to Forbes magazine Wayne Rooney, all by himself, will net more than $35 million from football this year. This is a fraction of what the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi will collect.
The point is that Wayne Rooney's football earnings are on par with the total worldwide operating budget of the World Anti-Doping Agency for 2015 at $37 million. Half that amount came from the International Olympic Committee, the other half was paid in by governments scattered across the globe. Countries in Europe contributed $8.7 million; nations in North and South America a combined $5.5 million. The Oceania region, including Australia, contributed a paltry aggregate of less than $500,000.
Is there any wonder then that the rat cunning of the Russian state can outsmart such an underfunded system, when the organisation's entire annual budget is not much more than half the base salary of a racing driver who has not won a race in more than three years?
The final Independent Person report to WADA, prepared by Canadian doping investigator Professor Richard McLaren and published last week, properly lifts the veil on the "organised infrastructure" and "institutional conspiracy" of doping that was carried on with impunity within Russia during from 2011 to 2015. Without overstatement, Professor McLaren's findings make for chilling reading.
What he concludes occurred inside the Russian state-sponsored sports machine up until last year – this period encompassing events including the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Sochi WInter Games – is on a scale that transcends the magnitude of any prior state-sponsored doping program such as those of the former East Germany.
The black magic of the AFL and NRL's "peptide years" of 2011 and 2012 bears no proper correlation with the Russian example. Australia's doping nadir occurred because many people, who should have known better, trusted one amateur witchdoctor harbouring Kim Jong-un-esque delusions of knowledge and expertise. The institutionalisation of doping within Russia involved the direct and active cooperation of Russia's sports ministry, its national anti-doping body, the present-day incarnation of the KGB, and Russia's WADA-accredited laboratory.
The Essendon example resulted in 34 athletes and (perplexingly) only one non-player facing sanctions for doping. Professor McLaren's report identifies 695 Russian and 19 other athletes – including foreign footballers – as being part of the orchestrated manipulation of positive doping control tests. It also identifies a further 246 athletes as having knowingly participated in tampering with sample tests, by switching their own urine for "clean" samples banked by them earlier, with the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia. The CSP is a state instrumentality in Russia, not dissimilar to the Australian Institute of Sport.
Yet sample-swapping was not the only method of manipulation deployed. Nescafe instant coffee granules were used to darken urine, to match the colour of other samples. The Russian Federal Security Service – the successor to the feared KGB – purposely developed a method of opening urine sample bottles and replacing "tamper-proof" seals in a manner undetectable to the untrained eye, and only provable through the analysis of a British ballistics expert engaged by Professor McLaren.
In round numbers, McLaren's report identified 1000 individual athletes across 30 different sports who have benefited by Russia's absolute, contumelious disregard and disrespect for even the most basic tenets of fairness and fair play. That is as many athletes as there are altogether in the top-flight playing lists of all 16 NRL teams, the eight Big Bash franchises and over half of the 18 AFL squads.
Such is the magnitude and magnificence of Russia's state-ordered cheating and deception it is utterly incomprehensible that any Russian athletes with a history of training under the command of the state should be permitted to participate in international competition in any of these 30 sports for the foreseeable future.
Yes, such an absolute prohibition inevitably would result in unfairness being inflicted on individual athletes, who may have escaped unharmed from the clutches of the state. But what, I ask, is the alternative? The next steps to be taken, after the publication of the McLaren report, are that there will be 1000 Russian athletes each under individual investigation for the purpose of potentially bringing individual anti-doping charges against each of them.
Russian athletes won 82 medals at the London Olympics; 33 in the home Winter Games at Sochi, and another 55 medals in Rio. Who could possibly know how many of those medallists have been infected with the misdeeds of the state. Is it even calculable how many clean athletes these Russian "medallists" denied a moment of glory? And that is not even touching on the additional problems of the same deception occurring at Paralympic Games, both winter and summer, and other events such as the 2013 World Athletics Championships held in Moscow.
The IOC has the power under its Olympic Charte, to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee from the Olympic Movement. The McLaren report is properly characterised as a prosecutorial brief, which must be reassembled in order to make the actual case for suspension against Russian athletes, support staff and the ROC itself. But once due process is observed and dispensed with due dispatch, if McLaren's findings pass judicial rigour – an electronic vault of evidence is publicly searchable at https://www.ipevidencedisclosurepackage.net – the outcome must be that Russian athletes not be invited to compete in Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo two years thereafter.
Further, why should it not be Russia that is forced to drop $200 million or more into WADA's derisory revenue stream to give a restructured WADA the proper resource base to meet its stated purpose of ensuring clean sport? Is that not a fair price?
At page 84 of his report Professor McLaren concludes that "the Russian Olympic team corrupted the London Games 2012 on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established". This sentence alone behoves the Olympic Movement to demand, with extreme prejudice, that Russia pay restitution, both pecuniary and sporting.
Darren Kane is a Sydney sports lawyer
Twitter: @sportslawyer7
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