US Soft Power Takes An Olympic Hit: Drug Cheating and Nobbling Opponents

The Tonya Harding Defence: Nobble Your Opponent

Ever since the Soviet Union imploded, the USA has been able to dominate the Olympics and therefore was able to display itself to the world as the pinnacle of sporting achievement; a sports End of History. Its multi-ethnic team also put forward an image of racial harmony and integration, independent of the realities of the domestic US. The US and Western nations enjoy a high level of control over the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the related anti-doping agency WADA (World Anti Doping Agency). Following Russia topping the medal table at the Sochi 2014 Olympics, WADA launched a massive investigation campaign against Russia that ended with the highly questionable banning of the whole Russian Olympic team and numerous athletes that had never failed a doping test; all of which affected Russian athlete participation in the 2016 Rio Olympics, 2018 Seoul Olympics, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

WADA has continued to harass and issue inordinate punishments to Russian athletes. Was there a real doping scandal in Russia? Yes, but the response was out of proportion especially when put in the context of continuous acceptance of Western doping - as we shall see below. Just as Russia was about to fully re-enter Olympic competition, the US was able to use the Western-dominated IOC to exclude Russia (and Belarus for good measure) from the Olympics due to the Ukraine conflict.

In the period since WW2 both South Africa and Rhodesia were banned because of their apartheid regimes, but never Israel for its apartheid regime and now outright genocide. Afghanistan was banned due to the Taliban’s stance on women, but never Saudi Arabia. And Kuwait because of its government’s interference in its Olympic committee. The US invaded Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq and destabilized Nicaragua and Syria through arming and funding terrorist organizations, and bombed Serbia and Libya into submission, and carried out numerous murders by drone of foreign nationals in foreign lands, and was never banned. Only Russia and Belarus for intervening to protect the people of the Donbass, after a decade of attempted Ukrainian ethnic cleansing.

Western nations have been able to “legalize” their own doping through a compliant WADA that incredulously has agreed that hundreds of US Olympic competitors (and Australian and French) suffer from ailments such as Asthma and ADHD which require treatment by the very stimulants that WADA is tasked with stopping the usage of. Nearly two thirds of such sickness related exemptions (Therapeutic Use Exemptions - TUEs) were provided to the US, Australian and French teams; including to famous medal winners. Perhaps there should be new team names:

• US Asthma Team (Swimming)

• US ADHD Team (Gymnastics)

• Australian Insomnia Team (Swimming)

• Swedish Asthma Team (Skiing)

The US winner of the Olympic 100m has stated that he has both asthma and ADHD, how many TUEs does he have? So many sick people who turn out to be world-class athletes! The utter arrogant manipulation and hypocrisy of the US is on display in this ABC news report on the subject.

At the same time, other teams such as China had hardly anyone claiming TUEs, and the WADA acceptance rate for such nation’s athletes requests was much lower. Also China, which has less doping violations than the US (even without all those TUEs) has had its athletes exposed to an inordinate level of testing and general abuse by WADA officials; including at the current Olympic games. This was a lovely cozy relationship which allowed the enhanced US and Western teams to stay just ahead of the increasingly competitive Chinese team, especially in “white” sports such as swimming; the biggest funder of WADA is the US. Also, WADA has delegated US testing to the US anti doping agency (USADA: a private non-for-profit US entity) while it has not done the same for China. WADA claimed that they “had” to test the Chinese team 2-3 times as much as the others to calm the fake US complaints, which of course can directly affect athletic performance; the US effectively attempted to nobble their opponents through over-testing. WADA happily went along with the ruse rather than telling the US where to go.

But even with all of these odds against them, the 1.4 billion population of China was increasingly turning out competitors who could beat the white competitors in swimming, tennis, and diving etc., as we are seeing at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Even in the 100 metres, which is the swimming equivalent of the 100 metres running event. Such Chinese dominance is a fundamental challenge to white supremacist and Western hegemonic beliefs, which are still held at the least implicitly by the majority of Westerners and Western athletes and their coaches. “How dare a Chinese swimmer beat the Australians, they must have been cheating” was the tone of the message from the Australian swim team coach.

The same from the US teams, and even the US state is now trying to act as judge and jury of WADA and the Chinese athletes; with US federal authorities having launched an investigation of Chinese swimmers. What imperial arrogance!

This is a classic imperial reaction to the ability of foreign nations to equal and better the imperial core, with China of course in the forefront and Russia close by. And of course the Western Mainstream Media Complex jumped fully in with the allegations, as they had done with those against Russian athletes.

Even a British sore loser sounding like a good colonial supremacist casting aspersions upon a Chinese swimming team that was completely cleared by WADA. Tough, you didn’t get gold, deal with it. And France 24 should be ashamed of this “guilty by aspersion” type reporting.

The over-reaching of the US has now forced even their friendly WADA to resist and publicly state some truths in order to hold on to whatever semblance of legitimacy and independence they have left. The reckoning for the US Olympic team could be absolutely brutal in the court of global public opinion, and extremely destructive of what remains of US soft power and global legitimacy.

So WADA issued a statement, responding to a Reuters article, outing a doping scheme by the US anti doping agency (USADA)

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) responds to a Reuters story of 7 August 2024 exposing a scheme whereby the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) allowed athletes who had doped, to compete for years, in at least one case without ever publishing or sanctioning their anti-doping rule violations, in direct contravention of the World Anti-Doping Code and USADA’s own rules.

This USADA scheme threatened the integrity of sporting competition, which the Code seeks to protect. By operating it, USADA was in clear breach of the rules. Contrary to the claims made by USADA, WADA did not sign off on this practice of permitting drug cheats to compete for years on the promise that they would try to obtain incriminating evidence against others.

Within the Code there is a provision whereby an athlete who provides substantial assistance can subsequently apply to have a proportion of their period of ineligibility suspended. However, there is a clear process for that, which does not involve allowing those who have cheated to continue to compete while they may or may not gather incriminating evidence against others and while they could retain a performance-enhancement effect from the substances they took. When WADA eventually found out about this non-compliant practice in 2021, many years after it had started, it immediately instructed USADA to desist.

WADA is now aware of at least three cases where athletes who had committed serious anti-doping rule violations were allowed to continue to compete for years while they acted as undercover agents for USADA, without it notifying WADA and without there being any provision allowing such a practice under the Code or USADA’s own rules.

In one case, an elite level athlete, who competed at Olympic qualifier and international events in the United States, admitted to taking steroids and EPO yet was permitted to continue competing all the way up to retirement. Their case was never published, results never disqualified, prize money never returned, and no suspension ever served. The athlete was allowed to line up against their unknowing competitors as if they had never cheated. In that case, when USADA eventually admitted to WADA what had been going on, it advised that any publication of consequences or disqualification of results would put the athlete’s security at risk and asked WADA to agree to non-publication. Being put in this impossible position, WADA had no choice but to agree (after verifying with its Intelligence and Investigations Department that the security threat was credible). The athlete’s doping was therefore never made public.

In another case of a high-level athlete, USADA never notified WADA of its decision to lift an athlete’s provisional suspension, which is an appealable decision, despite being required to do so under the Code. Had WADA been notified, it would never have allowed this.

How must other athletes feel knowing they were competing in good faith against those who were known by USADA to have cheated? It is ironic and hypocritical that USADA cries foul when it suspects other Anti-Doping Organizations are not following the rules to the letter while it did not announce doping cases for years and allowed cheats to carry on competing, on the off chance they might help them catch other possible violators. WADA wonders if the USADA Board of Directors, which governs USADA, or U.S. Congress, which funds it, knew about this non-compliant practice that not only undermined the integrity of sporting competition but also put the co-operating athletes’ security at risk.

So the US Olympic team conspiring with USADA has been openly flouting WADA rules, and allowing athletes that are known to have doped to continue competing. Sometimes it simply did not even tell WADA, and on one occasion when it did it blackmailed WADA into hiding the case.

In addition, WADA has also stated that 31% of US competitors were not sufficiently tested prior to the 2024 Olympics. And all of this is in addition to the legions of US athletes with TUEs!

Below is a documentary on the US Nike Project Oregon that was shut down in 2019, the discussion on the “legal” and illegal uses of performance enhancing drugs, and the shameful facilitating actions of certain US doctors and psychiatrists, starts at 40 minutes and 35 seconds.

And another US athlete on doping and the utter misuse of US “legal” doping:

And doping is US colleges:

The 2028 Summer Olympic Games will be in Los Angeles and the US will want itself to be seen as the leader in Olympic excellence. By then, most probably the Ukrainian conflict will be over and a formal agreement signed on its cessation - so will Russia be allowed back into the games? With another four years, Chinese investments in their athletic prowess will be paying off even more and will therefore provide an even bigger issue for the US at their home games. With both Russia and China back in the Olympics, the US could be relegated to third place and the “White Western” sports dominated by Russians and Chinese.

We may expect huge US efforts to keep Russia out of the games, even though a further suspension would greatly damage the games’ legitimacy. Also, more and more claims of Chinese “cheating” to desperately keep the main competitors down. In the interim, China should demand a thorough reshaping of IOC and WADA to reflect the global population and not just Western interests. The current WADA executive committee has a Polish president, a Chinese vice president (appointed 2020), an Italian, an Australian, an Argentinian, a Czech, a Papua New Guinean, a Belgian, a Turk, a Serbian, a Kenyan, a person from Burkino Faso, an American, a Japanese, a Frenchman, and a New Zealander

• Six European nations (Poland, Italy, Belgium, Czechia, France, New Zealand)

• Four White European Settler nations (US, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina)

• One Western Vassal (Japan)

• Two from Africa (Kenya [US ally] and Burkino Faso [only turned against the West since 2022]

• Two striving to be independent (Turkey and PNG)

• One from China

So out of sixteen positions, twelve Western and Western vassal nation representatives (including the president), one that has only recently turned against the West, two striving to be independent, and one from China. This is how the West plays the game of stacking international institutions to always play on their side.

The current International Olympic Committee executive board has a German president, vice presidents from Aruba (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), Spain, Morocco, and Argentina, executive members from Fiji, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Serbia, Italy, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Philippines and China, and a Director General from Belgium.

• Four out five senior officials are from European and European settler nations, with the exception being Morocco which is a pro-NATO US ally (it is also illegally occupying the Western Sahara but is not banned from the Olympics!). So the West gets five out of five!

• Four out of ten junior members are European countries, another two (Jordan and the Philippines) are Western vassals, three (Serbia, Zimbabwe and Fiji) can be seen as independent, and one is Chinese. So, the West gets six out of ten!

• The Director General is also from a European nation!

Also, out of 30 IOC commission heads, 16 are from European or European settler nations, 4 from Western vassal/allied nations (including a Ukraine that was never banned for its attempted ethnic cleansing of the Donbass), and one from a Colombia that was very recently a major US ally. China has only one head, Russian representatives are nowhere to be found at the IOC; which is located in Switzerland, while WADA is located in the US vassal of Canada. Stacking the deck once again in favour of Western interests. This mirrors the problems that the Other 7 Billion have in most international organizations, whether it be the World Bank and IMF (based in Washington US), the UN (based in New York, US), the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice (both in The Netherlands), and the OECD (Paris, France).

In most cases, Russia, China and others understand the need to build parallel organizations as the West will never accept losing control of the institutions that it set up to maintain its global dominance. Perhaps the IOC and WADA may be the same, hopefully not as that would lead to the destruction of the modern Olympic movement. The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, as well as the 2026 Milan and Corina d’Ampezzo Winter Olympics in Italy, may very well be the test of whether the IOC and WADA can throw off their Western background and embrace the World.

But probably nothing will be able to stop the US from digging itself deeper in the hole that it has happily dug for itself in a vain attempt to do the equivalent of holding back the tide. Greatly damaging the nation’s reputation abroad. Humility, introspection and basic respect seem to play no part in current US foreign policy, even when it stretches to sports.