Olympism: More Politicized Tragedy and Farce Than Sport
Dispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN
Hague Regulations along with Third and Fourth Geneva ban collective punishment. Applicable to armed conflicts, they have wider international humanitarian law implications. 
Putin with athletes. Russia and China should have simply boycotted the Olympics.
No one should be held responsible for an offense unless guilt is conclusively proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. No one should be punished for offenses committed by others. Everyone should be treated equitably and fairly.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, its additional protocols, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international laws affirm the rights of everyone no authority may legally deny.
Rio 2016 above all else features illegal, immoral and unethical Russia bashing by banning many of its athletes from competition because of the doping violations of a few.
Banishing Russia’s entire Paralympic team was the latest shoe to drop – International Paralympic Committee (IPC) president Philip Craven announcing on Sunday the ruling by its governing board “to suspend (Russia’s entire Paralympian team) with immediate effect.”
Targeting its Paralympians is especially galling – athletes showing enormous physical and emotional fortitude to compete in athletic contests despite disabilities preventing their normal functioning.
Banning all Russian Paralympians from next month’s games because of doping violations of some team members is further proof of Olympian disgrace – politics overriding sport, US pressure to get all Russian athletes banned resulting in too many unjustifiably denied the right to compete.
In response to the IPC ruling, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said an appeal will be submitted to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).”
SIDEBAR
Read below the filthy editorial filed by the New York Times editorial board, on July 19th, 2016. Such is their moral mendacity that it is worth reading in toto.
Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD JULY 19, 2016
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he latest and most comprehensive report on Russia’s cheating at the 2014 Winter Olympics gives the International Olympic Committee all the evidence it needs to ban every Russian team from the forthcoming Rio Games. The report, commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate a fast-growing body of evidence against Russia, is damning and unequivocal.
Compiled by Richard McLaren, a Canadian expert on sports ethics, it affirms “beyond a reasonable doubt” a massive government-ordered program of feeding steroids to Russian athletes and covering up the evidence — a program that involved various organs of the Russian state, including the sports ministry, the security service and the agency charged with preparing national teams.
The I.O.C. has already upheld a ban by the track and field ruling body to bar the Russian track and field team from the Rio Games. The integrity of the Games, the dreams of athletes the world over and the imperative to proclaim Russia’s behavior totally unacceptable all demand a blanket ban. Mr. McLaren’s report confirmed earlier revelations made to The Times by Russia’s former antidoping laboratory director, Grigory Rodchenkov, of an elaborate scheme to swap athletes’ urine samples during the 2014 Sochi Games. The scheme was part of a sweeping policy instituted after Russia’s poor showing in the 2010 Winter Olympics to conceal positive drug tests of athletes in “the vast majority of summer and winter Olympic sports.”
Russia will loudly remonstrate, as it did when the cheating accusations first arose, that the report is another American-orchestrated political ploy to discredit Russia, that doping is universal, that Russia will punish those responsible, that it is unfair to penalize all Russian athletes for the offenses of isolated officials and athletes, and so on.
All these tiresome bleats are intended to avoid the central point of the accusations: that the doping was ordered, directed and controlled by the Russian government, including its feared security services. The key figure in the program, the report says, was Yuri Nagornykh, who was appointed deputy minister of sport in 2010 by none other than Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time.
Mr. McLaren says no more of Mr. Putin, but it is impossible to imagine that Mr. Nagornykh’s appointment would not have come without a clear understanding of what he was expected to do — or that the F.S.B., the Russian security service, would get involved without direct orders from the Kremlin. According to Dr. Rodchenkov, it was the F.S.B. that figured out how to open purportedly tamper-proof urine containers.
Even before the new report was made public in Toronto on Monday, several national antidoping agencies and athletic organizations were preparing to demand that the I.O.C. broaden its earlier ban to cover all sports. The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Tygart, said such action was essential “to ensure this unprecedented level of criminality never again threatens the sports we cherish.”
The head of the I.O.C., Thomas Bach, has promised to impose the “toughest sanctions available” when the committee’s board meets on Tuesday. There is really no question what these must be.
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“We will fight for our Paralympians,” he stressed. Given deplorable anti-Russian media pressure alone, Sunday’s ruling along with banning other Russian athletes didn’t surprise.
New York Times editors disgracefully led the assault. On July 19, they headlined “Ban Russia From the Rio Olympics,” outrageously accusing “organs of the Russian state, the sports ministry, the security service and the agency charged with preparing national teams” with systemic anti-doping violations.
No credible evidence proved it, trumped up charges alone because of heavy US anti-Russia pressure exerted.
The Chicago Tribune called “banning Russia from Rio a must.” The Los Angeles Times urged “ban(ning) Russia from the Rio Olympics.” Other Western print and electronic media expressed similar sentiments.
With numerous Russian athletes barred from competition, along with its entire Paralympian team next month, the XXXI Olympiad is more politicized tragedy, farce and disgrace than sport at its best.
STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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