Althouse: "Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history..."

December 27, 2016

"Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history..."

"... a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi but also the entire Olympic movement."

21 comments:

Bob Ellison said...: Your headline made me think, "Is this about the Black Sox scandal of 1919?"; 12/27/16, 4:40 PM
rhhardin said...: National Lampoon April 1976 cover pic; 12/27/16, 4:44 PM
Bob Boyd said...: How long until someone at the NYT tells us that, in colluding with the Russians, Trump is guilty of "political doping."; 12/27/16, 4:48 PM
Greg Hlatky said...: Damn, the comments are something.; 12/27/16, 4:59 PM
Fernandinande said...: They should just legalize/permit the use of P.E.D.s and, for the purists and amateurs, have separate leagues where the drugs are still prohibited. For people who are purer than regular purists, they could have leagues where nobody does any modern training (just indian clubs and Dynamic Tension), and nobody takes vitamins or food supplements. For the most extreme purists they could just select random people, perhaps with no training at all, to compete at whatever.; 12/27/16, 5:20 PM
Big Mike said...: Yawn. Let me know when the IOC makes the doped up athletes return their medals. I note that no one has made the East German female athletes return their medals from the 1972, 1976, or 1980 Olympics even though the evidence that they were doped to their hair follicles is incontrovertible. No one will make the Russian athletes return their medals either.; 12/27/16, 5:34 PM
Yancey Ward said...: At this point, I think they should just abandon testing altogether. I no longer give a shit whether or not there is doping or not- my operative assumption is that they all cheat to some extent.; 12/27/16, 6:37 PM
David Begley said...: The 1972 USA men's basketball team has refused to take possession of silver medals. The refs cheated us out of the gold. Twice. The medals sit in a safety deposit box.

We need to face up to the fact that nearly the entire rest of the world hates us. Just look at the UN. It is naive and foolish in the extreme to think we can convince or persuade these other countries to like us. But that's how Obama, Kerrey and the Clintons think.; 12/27/16, 7:11 PM
Roger Sweeny said...: "[T]ainting ... the entire Olympic movement" is kind of like "tainting Hillary's reputation for honesty."; 12/27/16, 7:33 PM
Anonymous said...: Would you be surprised that the Russians have cheated on every weapons treaty
They ever signed? Bad faith in all things since 1917.

Well, they did hold up their end of the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact for a while.; 12/27/16, 7:47 PM
StephenFearby said...: "...The officials, however, continue to reject the accusation that the doping program was state-sponsored. They define the Russian state as President Vladimir V. Putin and his closest associates.

Ms. Antseliovich, who has not been directly implicated in the investigations, said she was shocked by the revelations."

Evoking Captain Renault (Casablanca):

"I'm shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here!"

Next up: "We also shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 (killing all 298 passengers & crew) with our Buk missile."

But don't hold your breath waiting for this admission.

The Buk launcher has been traced to the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade based in Kursk, Russia. The missile was fired from a field near Snizhne, Ukraine before the launcher was hurriedly taken on a stolen civilian flat bed truck back across the Russian border after the clowns discovered what they had done.; 12/27/16, 8:36 PM
n.n said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 12/27/16, 9:04 PM
n.n said...: Transgender/crossover.; 12/27/16, 9:05 PM
Original Mike said...: Russians cheat. Film at 11:00.; 12/27/16, 9:51 PM
Jon said...: @StephenFearby

BS. First, the origin of the Buk launcher has not been proven, the Dutch-led report you are citing was a biased joke, which relied on highly questionable interpretations of intercepts provided by Ukrainian intelligence. German intelligence concluded that the Buk had probably been captured from the Ukrainian military by the rebels.

Second, even if the Buk did come from Russia, the plane was likely shot down by the rebels, not the Russian military (unlike the Iranian passenger jet, that was shot down by US Navy personnel). Is the USA responsible for everything that others do with the weapons it supplies?

Third, as even the Dutch report admitted, the Ukrainian government deserves blame for the tragedy, for failing to close the airspace over the conflict zone, effectively using the passengers as human shields.

And fourth, 10 times as many civilians have been killed by Ukrainian government shelling of Donetsk and other cities in East Ukraine, than died on the Malaysia Airlines flight. But those deaths don't get 1/100th of the media coverage, because they don't fit the narrative.; 12/28/16, 7:23 AM
mikee said...: Big Mike, return of medals was settled pretty definitively when the Head of the Olympic Committee became offended by Jean Claude Killy's blatant drug abuse and womanizing after winning at the Olympics, and demanded Killy return his gold medal. Killy told him to try and take it. Nothing more was said.; 12/28/16, 10:15 AM
William said...: The real contest is to see who is the most adept and skillful in cheating. In this context we should pay proper homage to Lance Armstrong. He didn't have the resources and scientists of a government behind him and yet he still managed to stay ahead of the curve for many years. The man was truly great at what he did. He was the Babe Ruth of dopers.; 12/28/16, 10:29 AM
madAsHell said...: Can we conclude that the Olympics are a freak show on steroids?; 12/28/16, 10:35 AM
Static Ping said...: Your headline made me think, "Is this about the Black Sox scandal of 1919?"

I suppose it depends how to define "big." The Black Sox scandal was 8 players and some gamblers throwing the World Series. All the evidence points to the White Sox playing it straight in the regular season given they won the pennant. Of the 8 players, one of the banned players knew about the fix but didn't take part, one was a bench player whose ability to alter the Series's results were basically nil, and then there is the whole deal about whether Shoeless Joe was trying to win or not. It was a big deal in the sense that it brought into question the integrity of the game and therefore was an existential crisis, but by the numbers of persons involved the conspiracy was not especially large. This doping scandal appears to be, at minimum, involving hundreds of persons and probably thousands at the behest of the Russian government. It's orders of magnitude larger.; 12/28/16, 1:10 PM
Static Ping said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 12/28/16, 1:48 PM
Static Ping said...: The Olympic movement has been tainted for a very long time. The communist countries are well known for their extensive cheating involving everything from PEDs to rigged fencing epees. And it is not like they were alone in that regard. The Nazis sent out a man to compete in the women's high jump (he set the world record at another event before being discovered). At least two marathoners, a Greek and an American, finished the race because they went part way on a motor vehicle. There was the women's luge cheating scandal of 1968, which depending on who you believe was either the East Germans breaking the rules by heating up their rails (which made the luge go faster) or the West Germans bribing the officials to disqualify the East Germans. (Seriously, all that for women's luge?) Then there was the entire professional vs. amateur issue, which pitted veteran Soviet squads against college kids in sports like hockey and basketball since technically the communist countries did not have any professionals. It is said that the only thing that makes the myriad sins of professional boxing look good is Olympic boxing with numerous horror stories of incompetent and biased judging. We Americans had the joy of Marion Jones getting busted for PEDs after a marketing campaign that had her lecturing us. Then we can throw in the incredible amount of organizational corruption in the various Olympics committees, the blatantly obvious use of the Olympics as a political tool against the spirit of the games, and the crushing financial hardship this has caused in various municipalities.

The Russian doping scandal is just the latest in a series.; 12/28/16, 1:51 PM