Let the Russians Play!

Olympics 2016

On July 21, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ban on Russia’s track and field team from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, which begin on August 5. Russia’s exclusion is based on a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which accuses the Russian government, security services and sporting authorities of colluding to hide widespread doping. Three days later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board held back from imposing a blanket ban of all Russian athletes. Instead, the IOC left the door slightly ajar for individual athletes to appeal through the governing bodies of the various sports, while reserving to itself the final decision on who would be allowed to compete. Explicitly presumed guilty, the athletes must “rebut the applicability of collective responsibility.” Absence of positive drug tests won’t assure them a place in Rio, but any Russian athlete who has been previously sanctioned for doping will be automatically barred. Hypocritically, U.S. athletes who have previously served doping bans will be allowed to compete.

Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva accurately calls the persecution of the Russian team a “political hit job.” There is little doubt that the strings of the IOC puppet are being pulled by the U.S. imperialists to further their efforts to isolate Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In recent years, Washington has been building up NATO forces on Russia’s borders and in February 2014 backed a fascist-spearheaded, anti-Russian coup in Ukraine.

In response to calls by the U.S. and Canadian anti-doping agencies to ban Russia, Pat Hickey, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland and IOC executive board member, demanded to know “what mandate they have to lead an international call for a ban of another nation in the Olympic family.” Whether or not WADA’s allegations are true, we say: Let the Russians play! Just as we oppose the war on drugs that has filled America’s prisons with overwhelmingly black and Latino youth, we are opposed to the ban on what are deemed performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports. Whether an individual uses drugs—for fun or perceived enhancement of athletic ability—is a personal choice. Down with the war on drugs! Down with the ban on performance-enhancing drugs!

The IAAF, track and field’s governing body, claimed the Russians’ punishment would create a “level playing field” and uphold “the credibility and integrity of competition.” Pitting U.S. athletes backed by vast corporate support against those from impoverished countries where much of the population can barely afford food underscores that talk of a “level playing field” is code for keeping the poor and oppressed in their place.

The witchhunt against PEDs contradicts the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” A rational society would embrace the potentialities of improving human athletic performance, including through performance-enhancing drugs, while at the same time conducting an objective scientific study of the potential benefits and medical dangers. Dropping the ban on PEDs would also allow users to come out of the shadows and take the drugs under medical supervision. But capitalist society is not rational.

Who are these moral wardens of international sport? Nearly half of the current 90 IOC members—nine of them princes, princesses or sheiks—were chosen by former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who had been a longtime supporter of Spain’s bloody military dictator Francisco Franco, under whom he served as minister of sports. Current IOC president Thomas Bach was himself accused of cheating during the 1976 Olympic fencing competition.

In the quest to “purify” the Olympics, half a billion dollars is spent on 300,000 doping tests annually. A cabal of junior J. Edgar Hoovers in lab coats analyze urine samples, seeking not merely to see if the athletes have used a prohibited substance, but to ban those substances that turn up more frequently than others on the presumption they must be “performance enhancers.” Among those currently forbidden are dozens of legal medications and dietary supplements, as well as other medications: beta blockers for heart ailments, bronchodilators for asthma and the cold remedy pseudoephedrine (Sudafed). Even caffeine, which was banned for 20 years until 2004, when the WADA prigs deemed it too hard to police, is now again being considered for prohibition.

Olympic Festivals of Chauvinism

The IOC peddles the myth that “The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world.” British novelist George Orwell had a more sober view, “I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,” adding that “international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred” (“The Sporting Spirit,” 1945).

International athletic competition, which is organized along nation-state lines and largely government financed, necessarily expresses chauvinist ideology and has always been subordinated to diplomatic maneuvering. The Olympics have a particularly sordid history as an arena for national antagonism. They arose out of the sports associations that flourished after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Governments encouraged these associations in order to stimulate national pride and instill martial values.

The French founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, embodied the chauvinism, racism and class contempt that has permeated the Olympics. The baron, who adamantly opposed admitting German athletes to the games, declared “the modern athlete honors his country, his race, and his flag.” Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he advised, “People will learn a great lesson from the athlete: hatred without battle is not worthy of man, and insult without blows is utterly unbecoming.”

Britain and France attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as part of their policy of “appeasement” toward Nazi Germany. It was there that black track star Jesse Owens smashed Hitler’s parade of the “Aryan master race” with his record-setting four gold medals. Owens’s final medal, as part of the 4x100-meter relay squad, was made possible by a last-minute decision by U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) head Avery Brundage to remove Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller from the race, in order to spare Hitler the sight of Jews on the medal stand.

After the games, Brundage enthused, “We can learn much from Germany. We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.” For his heroic efforts, Owens was greeted with a reception at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but was forced to enter through a freight elevator. Despite being exhausted after his Olympic performance, Owens was ordered to compete in a number of exhibitions, one of which he refused, leading to his suspension by the Amateur Athletic Union and blacklisting from amateur sports for life.

The Olympic celebration of national chauvinism has at times been punctured by protests against national and racial oppression. In 1906, long jumper Peter O’Connor, an ardent Irish nationalist, chafed at being forced to compete under the British flag. During the medal ceremony, when the Union Jack was hoisted in honor of his silver-medal performance, O’Connor shimmied up the flagpole and unfurled a large green flag bearing a golden harp and the words Erin Go Bragh (Ireland Forever). At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, with Brundage at the head of the IOC, gold and bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos were banished from the U.S. team and given 48 hours to get out of Mexico after they raised the clenched-fist “black power” salute during the medal ceremony in protest against racist discrimination and poverty.

The hysteria over performance enhancers began as a response to the international successes of athletes from the Soviet Union and the East European bureaucratically deformed workers states in the 1970s and ’80s. Particularly, with the Soviet Union’s first Olympic appearance in 1952, the Olympics were reduced to a symbolic test of superiority between “Soviet Socialist man” and the “rugged individualism” of the capitalist world. It was considered a minor national trauma when the U.S. won fewer medals than the USSR in 1956. This competition intensified with the renewed Cold War inaugurated in the late 1970s under Democrat Jimmy Carter. Following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan against the murderous U.S.-backed mujahedin—the precursors of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS—Carter ordered the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, with the aim of whipping up an anti-Soviet frenzy.

The Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. However, the U.S. attitude toward Russia today resembles something from the days of the 1950s Cold War era, with the vilification of Russia a theme constantly reiterated by U.S. media and politicians. But the U.S. imperialists’ hostility to Russia is no longer about overthrowing the collectivized property relations that were established by the 1917 October Revolution. Rather, it is an expression of Washington’s determination to keep Russia, a regional capitalist power with imperial ambitions, out of the club of imperialist powers. To isolate Russia, the U.S. has once again made the Olympics a pawn in its game.