Vote to Reinstate Russia Exposes Rifts in Antidoping Community

The vote last week by the World Anti-Doping Agency to allow Russia to return to the international sports fold has laid bare the deep fissures within the community of athletes and officials who oversee the world’s competitions.

In the days since the decision to take Russia off the top antidoping organization’s list of noncompliant countries, dozens of current and former athletes and leaders of national antidoping agencies, largely from Western nations, have voiced their frustration with WADA for what they see as letting Russia off the hook after it corrupted years of international events, including the 2014 Winter Olympics.

In what amounted to a series of emergency meetings, Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, spent Wednesday in Washington with a contingent of other antidoping supporters, including Linda Hofstad Helleland, the vice president of WADA who voted against clearing the Russians, and Emma Coburn, an Olympic bronze medalist in track and field. They rushed from appointment to appointment, talking to lawmakers and government officials about the need for WADA reform.

They spent the morning at the White House in discussions with Jim Carroll, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and then headed to Capitol Hill for sit-downs with representatives and senators.

Helleland, a Norwegian politician who was one of the two dissenters in the 9-2 vote for Russia’s reinstatement, was in New York for meetings at the United Nations, and said she added a day in Washington onto her business trip because this was a critical time in the history of antidoping.

“Antidoping hasn’t been on the agenda of political leaders, but now they are paying attention because the Russia situation has been a big wake-up call,” said Helleland, who plans to run for WADA president next year. “I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in sports right now. Athletes everywhere are telling me that they’ve lost their belief in antidoping. It’s so painful for me to hear, and we’ve got to do something about it right now.”

With the United States set to host the Olympics in 2028, Tygart said there was a new opportunity for the federal government to focus on worldwide antidoping.

“Our government is going to invest a lot of time and money into the Games here, and it should want those Games to be clean,” Tygart said, adding that worldwide governments’ sudden interest in antidoping “is a silver lining in this very dark cloud.”

Coburn, an American runner who was the 2017 world champion in steeplechase, said athletes understand they need to come together to do the work that WADA was supposed to do to ensure fair play.