Performance enhancing drugs have always had a prominent place since the modern Olympics began in 1896, with the usage of strychnine (yes, that is rat poison) in the early 20th century, to the dominant East German teams of the 1960s and 1970s notorious for being heavy steroid users, so heavy in fact several of the misled female athletes have faced permanent body chemistry alterations with severe health problems associated with them. Track and Field is no exception with Florence Griffith-Joyner still being dogged by rumors of performance-enhancing drug use, despite being deceased since 1998.
There is also the “Dirtiest Race in History,” the men’s 100 meter race final for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul in which eight of the ten racers at one point or another in their careers tested positive for a banned substance, with Ben Johnson losing his Gold Medal over testing positive for stanozolol after the race. These scandals have usually impacted the athletes the hardest, today, however, with the ruling of International Association of Athletics Federations an entire country has finally got to pay the proverbial piper over a country’s athletics team having a widespread doping program.
The Russian Federation, a country of over 100 million people, will send exactly zero athletes for the track and field events in this summer’s Olympiad and frankly it is surprising that the IAAF would uphold this stiff penalty as a country has never before been banned from competing because of doping. The penalty comes after the World Anti-Doping Agency has been investigating for over six months and found out shocking things about Russian track and field. In addition to supplying banned substances, authorities also tampered with or destroyed samples from athletes that would have shown positive tests and this went on in the 2008, 2012, and 2014 Olympiads.
Although Russian authorities claim they support fighting PED’s there are also some prominent officials, namely leader Vladimir Putin, who think the decision made was political in nature. The Russian athletics program is appealing to the International Olympic committee but the IOC has been noted to defer to governing bodies on decisions such as bans. This ban should stand, though, not because of a vendetta against Russian athletics, but it sends a powerful message about how seriously drug-cheating is taken now in international sports.
