A big-time Russian whistleblower recently spilled astonishing details of how top athletes cheated, with a likely assist from the Kremlin, to snag medals at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
How? Athletes slugged down a three-drug cocktail of banned performance-enhancing substances mixed with Chivas or vermouth. They relied on Russian intelligence officials, who used spycraft to secretly swap urine samples, somehow breaking into supposedly tamper-proof bottles, The New York Times reports. Those under suspicion include some of Russia’s biggest stars, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won gold medals.
Should Russia be banned from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil? Yes. The Olympics can’t condone such fraud.
No, we don’t imagine the Russians are the only ones flouting rules. And no, the Olympics doesn’t hold exclusive rights to deceit. Witness decades of cheating in baseball, from the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919 to the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, whose corked bats hit steroid-fueled homers, to every pitcher who hurled a spitball and every coach who stole a sign.
Or football — ah, the New England Patriots’ Deflate-gate. Or professional biking — the performance-enhancing juicing spree of Lance Armstrong and many others. This year brought another landmark in cycling flimflam: The first confirmed case of what’s called “mechanical doping” — that is, bikers rigging tiny hidden battery-powered motors to give their bikes a boost toward the finish line.
It’s almost enough for us to propose a radical solution for dealing with the sporting world’s most brazen, clever and foolhardy con artists, swindlers and tinkerers: Why not fence off the offenders from the honest athletes and let them run (and race) amok? How about a separate Olympics just for cheaters?
A no-holds-barred Cheaters Olympics would allow athletes to push the limits, to do whatever they can (short of injuring an opponent) to excel. Think of this competition as a new extreme sports event, like one of those mixed martial arts minimal-rule melees that allow people to pummel each other with any available appendage.
Do we condone cheating? Of course not. Repeat: We do not.
But isn’t it fascinating to imagine just how far science, super-shoes and other gear can boosthuman abilities? As records topple — remember the 4-minute mile, the 61-home-run season — we wonder what other feats, now considered impossible, might someday fall within the realm of human athletic achievement.
The 3-minute mile? The 8-second 100-meter dash? The 9-foot high jump?
We can already hear readers sputtering that a Cheaters Olympics would send a disastrous message to children about fair play, not to mention encouraging young athletes to experiment with performance-altering drugs that could seriously damage their health.
But how about the Cheaters Olympics as a prime example for young athletes of What Not To Do? From a young age, children know they’re not supposed to cheat. And they learn that some athletes do. Children also could learn that we isolate cheaters in their own Olympics. Moreover, what if most cheaters don’t perform better?
The Cheaters Olympics also could confer a huge benefit to the legitimate version: Viewers and competitors could be more certain that the competition was untainted. All the runners, jumpers, throwers, swimmers and others who turned in thrilling performances did so without illegal chemical or mechanical assistance.
Only one rule for the Cheaters Olympics: Winners and losers would have to disclose fully what they ingested, how they trained, what contraptions they used to triumph. Compiling that data could save future athletes from ruining their health by experimenting with things shown, by trial and error, not to work.
Come August, global audiences will witness some of the world’s greatest athletes — and some of the greatest cheaters — in Rio de Janeiro. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew which was which?