Russian doping scandal reveals sport's win-at-all-costs mentality

What an interesting and challenging time for Carla Qualtrough to assume her duties as Canada's new cabinet minister responsible for the sport portfolio. Her official title is Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities, but it's sport that's going to require some immediate attention.

The revelations from the World Anti Doping Agency's independent commission headed by Canadian Richard Pound, which confirmed systematic doping and coverups at the highest levels in Russian athletics, is the latest blow to the integrity of sport in general.

"It's a blemish on all of sport when you see this systematic cheating going on," Qualtrough said in a lengthy interview with CBC Sports.

"As a leader in this fight we need to focus on the educational side of anti-doping. We need to to educate our athletes before they become national team members on the pitfalls of doping, on their options and what they can do. I think we also need to hold our coaches and doctors significantly accountable for putting our athletes, who are in a position of vulnerability, into these situations."

There is, of course, more to this than meets the eye.

Just business?

​For instance, a dark cloud is hanging over FIFA as the governing body of international soccer lurches toward World Cups in Russia and Qatar amidst allegations of bribery and corruption. Closer to home, the Canadian Olympic Committee has fires to put out concerning its leadership and governance in the wake of its president Marcel Aubut
resigning under the suspicion of sexual harassment.

There is a lot to be cynical about when it comes to sport.

Increasingly, the focus is on the motives of the people at the top. And the question is ever evolving into one of faith and believability. Is sport at the highest levels really sport at all? Or is it really just business controlled by people of questionable character?

Let's deal with the fallout from the WADA report first.

Tip of the iceberg

Pound made it clear at the outset that the report deals solely with Russia and the sport of athletics. So the recommendation to shut down a Moscow laboratory, slap five athletes and coaches with lifetime bans
and suspend Russian track and field athletes from international competitions leading up to the Rio Olympics, while game changing, represents the tip of the iceberg.

Let's not forget that the immediate past president of the IAAF, Lamine Diack of Senegal has been arrested and is alleged to have taken more than a million euros in bribes to overlook doping infractions. It's also a fact that leaked files from the IAAF reveal that the results of 12,000 blood samples taken from 5,000 athletes between 2001 and 2012
could potentially be damning on a much more universal basis.

The findings suggest that one third of all medals, including 55 gold, won in the endurance events (800 metres to marathon) at the Olympics and world track and field championships during that time frame were won by athletes who provided suspicious blood tests. There were athletes from many countries other than Russia in that group.

Winter Olympics tainted?

On another front, there are more questions being raised about the veracity of results in a variety of international competitions. The Moscow doping lab which oversaw the world track and field championships in 2013, where Russia won the most gold medals at home, was also employed for the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. There, Russian athletes won 33 medals, 13 of them gold. Four years previously in Vancouver, the Russians were disgraced by an 11th-place finish and won 15 medals, only three of them gold.

The disparity in production also exists in track and field. At the 2013 Moscow world championships, Russian athletes topped the charts with seven gold medals (they had 17 podium finishes in all). Under a cloud of suspicion at the most recent worlds in Beijing this summer, they delivered only four medals, four fewer than Canada.

All of which points to motive and a win-at-all-costs mentality which seemingly pervades the Russian sporting system — a system where pride dictates that athletes do whatever it takes to be victorious, even if it means engaging in systematic cheating under the direction of the people at the very top of the food chain.

Qualtrough believes this is one of the biggest challenges that sport faces in the modern age — that it must ring true and that people need to believe in it in order for it to have value. And that it be about more than winning the most medals.

"I think everyone fundamentally has a right to sport and they have a right to participate in sport at the level they want to," she stressed. "I think our system needs to catch up to that ideal for sure. We need to look at sport as a vehicle by which we interact with each other."

And that means in order to have integrity, sport in general must overcome a win-at-all-costs mentality which threatens to destroy its credibility.

Scott Russell is a host of CBC's Road to the Olympic Games.