Why the Olympics still has a doping problem

NOT SO LONG ago it seemed that the Olympics was winning its battle with drug cheats. Retests of samples from competitors at the Beijing and London games led to more than 100 medalists being disqualified for doping. This tally highlighted the prevalence of drugtaking in Olympic sports, but also the success of anti-doping authorities. The creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 1999 had shown that the sports world was serious about ending cheating. High-profile dopers, such as Marion Jones, an American athlete, were punished retroactively. Meanwhile a new generation of athletes like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps broke records without the help of banned substances.

That all changed in late 2014. In a documentary aired on ARD, a German television network, Yuliya Stepanova, a Russian athlete, gave evidence that her country’s government, sports federations and drug testers were working together to enable widespread cheating. As the story grew, Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia’s national anti-doping programme, admitted that he had run a vast doping operation during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. He and his team had built a laboratory inside the site of the games, allowing them to replace dopers’ urine tests with clean samples produced months before. Russia topped the medal table and none of the cheats were caught. A decade later, has international sport cleaned up its act?