Russia Blames Others for Its Doping Woes

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/opinion/russia-blames-others-for-its-doping-woes.html

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The recent obituary of Nina Ponomareva, a discus thrower who in 1952 became the first Soviet athlete to win an Olympic gold medal, recounts how she later made a foolish mistake. On a trip to London, she was caught shoplifting some hats. To the authorities in Moscow, however, the mistake was not hers. It was all a British “dirty provocation.”

That became the standard prism through which the Soviets viewed any punitive action against them: politically motivated, always a provocation, never justified. And even though the Cold War is long over, President Vladimir Putin remains stuck in the same, snarling defensive crouch in his responses to any accusations of Russian foul play, from the seizure of Crimea to the widespread state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes.

Yet Russia’s reaction to being banned from the Paralympic Games seems particularly outrageous. The Russian team was banned because Mr. Putin’s greed for medals, in the illusion that they cover his authoritarian rule with glory, has led to the systematic doping of athletes, including those for whom competition represents a triumph over physical disabilities.

Announcing the ban earlier this month, Sir Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee and himself a former wheelchair basketball player, was scathing: Russia’s “medals over morals mentality disgusts me.”

Far from taking such rebukes to heart, Mr. Putin’s government has begun a loud campaign to depict itself as the aggrieved party, feeding a furious anti-American and anti-Western frenzy in the Russian media and public. Turning the accusations on their head, Mr. Putin on Thursday declared it was “just cynical to take it out on people for whom sport has become the meaning of life.”

It is hard to say how much of this Mr. Putin believes. But the degree to which the narrative of victimization has taken hold in Russia is worrying. For instance, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia’s antidoping laboratory who provided evidence of the doping and is now in the United States, is reviled in the Russian media as a traitorous liar, and some Russian officials have gone so far as to assert that it was the World Anti-Doping Agency that ordered him to tamper with athletes’ urine samples.

Having brought Russia’s doping practices to light, the International Olympic Committee, the International Paralympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency should counter Mr. Putin’s lies by making as clear as they can that Russia’s athletes, and especially its disabled athletes, have been betrayed by their government, and their government alone.