“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
The Russian Affair
Return to the book list for this category.
David Walsh. London, Simon & Schuster, 2020 ISBN 978-1-4711-5815-5
46 Russian athletes had had their performances in the 2012 Olympics removed from the records for doping offences. Russia will not participate in the Tokyo Olympics for serial doping offences. This book tells that gripping story of how one Russian couple started a process that brought Russian sport down in disgrace like a pack of cards.
Vitaly Stepanov was an idealistic young man who joined RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency, determined to play his part in making the world a better place and stamp out doping. He was, after all, working for an agency whose role was to do just that – or so he thought.
A human-interest angle of the story is at its heart. Vitaly and his future wife have a first date and discover that he is an anti-doping enforcement officer and she an athlete who relies on drugs. The tension between them is never far from the surface. Vitaly sums up the dilemma at the centre of their marriage: “He was ruining her life. What she believed impacted him in marginal ways. What he believed was crushing her”.
Vitaly is shocked to discover the pervasiveness of Russian sports corruption. Eventually he summed the situation up: “RUSADA is a joke. We paint stripes on a donkey arid pretend it’s a zebra”. The people who are supposed to enforce anti-doping procedures were compliant in helping athletes and sports administrators navigate around the regulations.
The way drug enforcement works is that doping officers turn up unannounced with the right to test any athlete. The way it worked in Russia was that RUSADA was given a list of athletes they were allowed to test (the clean ones) and a list that they were not (those who were not clean). If a doping athlete could not avoid a test, the athlete could pay $300 to made the result of the test disappear. If an international body insisted that a particular athlete be tested, the authorities would calculate how long the evidence of dope would remain in the athlete’s body and delay the test until after that date.
Vitaly sent information to WADA (World Anti Doping Agency) regularly over several years but found WADA “long on encouragement and short on action”. When Hajo Seppelt, a German TV producer, contacts him and believes him, it is the turning point. WADA operates on a basis of co-operation with national anti-doping agencies. When an anti-doping agency is corrupt, WADA’s - rules at the time - prevented it from intervening.
Eventually Yuliya becomes disillusioned and is persuaded to have conversations with athletes, coaches and officials. She records the conversations in which they talk openly about doping. This is the evidence on which the documentary is based. By the time the documentary airs, the couple are safely in the West.
In 2014 the German TV channel ARD broadcast Geheimsache Doping: Wie Russland seine Sieger macht (The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners), the documentary based on evidence gathered by Vitaly and Yuliya Stepanov. The programme started a process which led to Russian Athletics being banned from 2016 Olympics and subsequent world championships.
The book reads like a novel which makes it easy to read. The weakness, I feel, was that I was left wondering how such detailed accounts of meetings and conversations could have been written years later. The basic facts are beyond dispute and are well set out. Some of the detail has to be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt.
A must-read for anyone interested in athletics or Olympic sports.