Shamelessly ‘Ashamed’ in Moscow

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/opinion/shamelessly-ashamed-in-moscow.html

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Of the things Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s minister of sports, wrote in his “apology” for what he described as Russia’s “problem” with doping, one is true: “It cannot be right that clean athletes should suffer for the behavior of others.”

That is exactly why Russia was suspended from international track and field competition by the International Association of Athletics Federations in November and why its participation in those events in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August is in limbo. Clean athletes should not be made to suffer for Russia’s systematic cheating. Alas, that is not what Mr. Mutko had in mind, and his statement is far from demonstrating any acknowledgment, much less contrition, about the widespread state-sponsored doping of which Russia stands accused.

In the statement, published in The Sunday Times in Britain, Mr. Mutko crudely passes the buck, claiming that “serious mistakes have been made by the federation management, along with athletes and coaches.” Taking the hypocrisy up another notch, he declares, “We are ashamed of them.” Ashamed of whom? The athletes who were regularly fed anabolic steroids by the very officials who were supposed to be protecting them from performance-enhancing drugs, encouraged and assisted by state security agents? Where is the shame for the state agencies, including his own ministry, that are behind the doping of Russian athletes?

Of that, there is no hint in Mr. Mutko’s statement. He also gave no response to the report on Russian doping prepared for the World Anti-Doping Agency that was issued in November or the conclusion of Dick Pound, the chairman of the independent commission that wrote the report, who declared at the time that Mr. Mutko had to be aware of the program, “and if he’s aware of it, he’s complicit in it.”

The director of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, now in self-imposed exile in the United States, recently provided astonishing details of how the doping was done during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, with Russian agents swapping drug-tainted urine samples for clean samples and resealing the purportedly tamper-proof caps. The response of Mr. Mutko and other Russian officials has been to pose as aggrieved victims of “the information attack on Russian sport” and to threaten lawsuits.

Mr. Mutko no doubt calculated that his non-apology would persuade the International Association of Athletics Federations to lift Russia’s suspension in time for the Olympics. In fact, his refusal to address the role of the state and his ministry in the doping program is evidence that he and his government are nowhere near the “change of culture” that the I.A.A.F. wants to see before letting Russian athletes back on the field.