OLYMPIC DOPING DÉJÀ VU: WHY ARE THE ADULTS COWERING AGAIN?

Leading Olympic and doping officials have again surrendered to yet another authoritarian regime with a long history of doping.

As the Games of the 33^rd Olympiad continue in Paris, leading Olympic and doping officials have again surrendered to yet another authoritarian regime with a long history of doping.

Once again, Olympic leaders have chosen political expediency, if not cowardice, over their ostensible priority – the athletes representing the youth of the world.

Only this spring did journalists reveal that, three years ago, the World Anti-Doping Agency secretly allowed Chinese swimmers with a history of failed doping tests to compete and win medals at the last Olympics in Tokyo.

Further, some of the same athletes have already won medals in the swimming competition at the Paris Games — and this cast of likely cheaters are likely to win more. 

Moreover, WADA has let Chinese sports officials get away with the claim that multiple doping incidents were caused by “environmental contamination,” such as swimmers, en masse, unknowingly eating hotel food with a performance-enhancing substance. In another case, the Chinese are blaming hamburgers somehow laced with a drug used to make people go faster in the water.

Doping experts, such as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency head Travis Tygart, will tell you that these explanations are not just highly implausible, but very unoriginal. Blaming the chef is a common refuge of guilty PED users.   

What is as troubling about this new doping scandal is how a dark part of Olympic history is repeating itself.               

After working at 12 Olympics for CBS and NBC, I wrote and directed a 2016 documentary about the decades-long, state-sponsored East German doping program, which stretched from the late 1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989.

Called The Last Gold, the film focused on the women’s swimming competition at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where doped East German athletes – powered by the anabolic steroid Oral Turinabol – dominated the competition.

The title of the documentary refers to the last race and the “last gold” of the swim competition in Montreal, the 4x100-meter women’s relay, when a clean U.S. team of Kim Peyton, Wendy Boglioli, Jill Sterkel, and Shirley Babashoff narrowly – but incredibly – defeated a doped East German team.

To win this last gold required swimming out of their minds and shattering the world record – by four seconds.  

It was the only gold medal won by the U.S. female swimmers in Montreal. Yet, overall, they broke 15 American records at the 1976 Olympics – more than any previous U.S. women’s Olympic team.

Instead, East Germany won 11 of the 13 races. The country’s star, Kornelia Ender, became the first female swimmer to win four golds in one Olympic Games.

During the filming of The Last Gold, Ender told us, “It said right there in our orders: you must beat the enemy.”

Back in 1976, the U.S. swimmers asked Olympic officials and members of the press to address this lethal conspiracy hiding in plain sight. Not only did the East German athletes look like men, some with baritone voices, they were also winning races by pool lengths.

“I was being cheated,” said Babashoff, who, in addition to winning gold in Montreal, admirably battled to take four silvers in races won by doped East Germans.

“The thing was no one else saw it,” Babashoff added. “There were all these other adults around who did not see the difference.”

But, in fact, the adults just decided to ignore it, while watching silently as the young U.S. female athletes faced blowback because they dared to ask for some kind of sporting justice.

Babashoff was called “surly.” A headline characterized the U.S. swimmers as “ugly Americans in swim suits.” After Montreal, Boglioli had to contact the FBI after receiving death threats.   

Mark Schubert, who was Babashoff’s coach at the time and later an eight-time U.S. Olympic swim coach, now freely admits “we could have done more.”

Today, as in 1976, U.S. swimmers – including mega-stars Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky – are bravely challenging China’s dubious doping explanations. But, again, the adults are either complicit or silent.

One of those adults is the head of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, who is backing the inexcusable behavior of China and WADA in spite of being highly attuned to the truly sordid East German chapter in Olympic history.

In 1976, competing for what was then West Germany, Bach won a fencing gold medal at the Montreal Olympics, where cheating East German athletes won, overall, an astounding 90 medals.

As Bach also knows, a fellow West German, microbiologist Dr. Werner Franke, rushed into East Germany as this paranoid police state collapsed in 1989 and, in a true Mission Impossible-style heist, saved from destruction a trove of documents describing, in great detail, the doping of thousands of athletes. (Franke, below.)

The leadership at World Aquatics should also be reminded that, back in the 1970s, the organization put the Dark Lord of East German swim doping, Dr. Luther Kipke, on its medical commission, which insured that the East Germans could keep redesigning their doping regimen to beat improvements in testing methods.

In the meantime, has anything changed among the adults in the U.S. Olympic world since U.S. female swimmers were hung out to dry at the 1976 Montreal Games?

To this point, it appears the leadership of the United States Olympic Committee and USA Swimming have yet to boldly stand side by side with Phelps, Ledecky and other U.S. swimmers who are loudly wondering why dictatorship doping déjà vu is ok.

I would also hope that the adults leading the primetime Olympic broadcasts for NBC/Comcast, my former employer, will join fearless U.S. athletes in standing up to China and, further, tell viewers that the Paris swim competition has been inexcusably corrupted.

There is also this to consider: China’s doping problems are not new.

During the 1996 Atlanta Opening Ceremony, Bob Costas noted China’s human rights abuses, but also reminded viewers that Chinese swimmers, being coached by former East Germans, had been caught doping preceding the Games.

The leadership in Beijing demanded that the NBC Olympic host publicly apologize, though Costas had only stated facts.

He didn’t apologize.

But NBC did – mindful of the lucrative Chinese market being exploited by NBC’s parent company at the time, General Electric.

The modern Olympics were conceived by France’s Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Therefore, Olympism is a French conception and, moreover, it was de Coubertin who wrote the first Athlete's Oath, introduced at the 1920 Antwerp Games.

In Paris, the oath was just heard again at the Opening Ceremony. Modified since 1920, it includes these words:

Together we stand in solidarity and commit ourselves to sport without doping, without cheating … We do this for the honour of our teams, in respect for the Fundamental Principles of Olympism.

But, in surrendering again to another win-at-all-costs authoritarian regime, adults in Olympic leadership are defying the very ethos that makes this fragile and unifying enterprise so precious.