This is how some Western athletes are misusing the Olympic doping scandal

In an article I wrote for The Duran about the Russian Olympic Doping scandal on 18th July 2016 I said that there was something “very ugly” about the whole affair.  In a more recent article about the ban on Russia’s Paralympic athletes Rick Sterling uses the same word.  Perhaps the single nastiest manifestation of this ugliness is the heartless bulling and abuse of their fellow Russian athletes by some Western athletes, who are being egged on to do it by parts of the Western media.

On 24th July 2016 I discussed the shocking comment made by the British athlete Jeanette Kwakye dehumanising Russian athletes:

“The Russian athletes seemed dispensable, almost as if there was another athlete ready to come off the production line and replace them if they didn’t do the job required of them.”

Such comments have now become routine.  For example I read in the London Evening Standard  on 12th August 2016 sprinter Martyn Rooney openly gloating about the exclusion from the Rio Olympics of Russian track and field athletes:

“….when they said the {Russian track and field) team was banned I couldn’t believe it.  I was delighted and I think a lot of athletes are”.

Far surpassing even this behaviour has however been the boorish treatment of the young Russian swimmer Yulia Yefimova, with even the Washington Post finally being driven to publish an article criticising the shocking behaviour towards her of the young US swimmer Lilly King. 

As the article points out, of Yefimova’s two drugs offences the first was undoubtedly a genuine mistake – recognised as such by WADA – caused by her mistakenly taking a food supplement without realising that it contained a banned hormone, whilst her second, involving meldonium (the same recently prohibited drug used to ban the Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova) may have been due to problems with testing rather than illicit drugs use, in which case it was not a drugs offence at all. 

More to the point, since Yefimova actually lives and trains in the US and has done so since 2011, she cannot have been involved in any state sponsored system of doping in Russia, which is what the McLaren report is supposed to have exposed, and what the Russian doping scandal is supposed to be about.

People like Lilly King are unlikely to know every detail of the doping scandal.  However they are surely well informed about the particular athletes like Yefimova they are directly competing against.

The Olympic Games are supposed to be inclusive, bringing together young people from all over the world to compete with each other in sport so as to foster peace.  The bullying of Russian athletes by their fellow Western athletes shows that for some people this has become a fiction, and that in their quest to win and gain the massive financial rewards involved in doing so they are prepared to use the scandal to knock out potential competitors and harass and intimidate others.