by Ben Norton, published on Geopolitical Economy, August 11, 2024
The World Anti-Doping Agency says the US has for a decade allowed athletes in international competitions, including the Olympics, to cheat by using prohibited drugs, while it hypocritically criticizes Russia and China.
The United States has for a decade allowed athletes in international competitions, including the Olympics, to use prohibited drugs such as steroids, recruiting them as informants to spy on others.
This is according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the global authority on the use of banned substances in sports.
WADA revealed this in a statement on August 7, detailing “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”.
WADA wrote in no uncertain terms that this “USADA scheme threatened the integrity of sporting competition”, stressing that, “By operating it, USADA was in clear breach of the rules”.
“How must other athletes feel knowing they were competing in good faith against those who were known by USADA to have cheated?” asked WADA.
According to Reuters, this USADA scheme goes back at least to 2011.
The United States plans to host the Olympics in 2028 and 2034, although this could change, because WADA has announced that it will take the US Anti-Doping Agency to the Independent Compliance Review Committee, given its clear violations of global rules.
A bipartisan group of US Congress members responded to this news with threats, vowing to cut funding for WADA.
The US Anti-Doping Agency misleadingly claims to be a “non-governmental organization”, but in reality it is funded by the US government and overseen by the Congress.
USADA has frequently accused Washington’s geopolitical adversaries of violating anti-doping rules.
WADA criticized the hypocrisy of the United States, writing, “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”.
Russia was banned from the 2020 and 2022 Olympics over allegations that its athletes used prohibited drugs.
The US has accused China’s team of doping, leading to harassment of Chinese athletes in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. The average Chinese swimmer was subjected to 21 drug tests, compared to just six for US swimmers and four for European and Japanese swimmers.
For its part, China’s Anti-Doping Agency (CHINADA) accused the United States of not scrutinizing its own participants, alleging that 31% of US athletes were not sufficiently tested in the year leading up to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
A WADA spokesperson told British state media the BBC, “Certain individuals [in the US] are attempting to score political points purely on the basis that the athletes in question are Chinese”.
The WADA representative lamented that, due to Washington’s aggressive political campaign, “The result is that it has created distrust and division within the anti-doping system”.
The United States has politicized sports for many decades, but the tensions have dramatically escalated in recent years as Washington has waged a new cold war against China and Russia.
In 2020, the US Justice Department accused Russia and Qatar of bribing FIFA in order to host the World Cup in 2018 and 2022, respectively.
After facing bans in 2020 and 2022 on allegations of doping, Russia was again barred from the 2024 Olympics, this time on explicitly political grounds.
The executive board of the International Olympic Committee, which is largely dominated by Western countries, called to prohibit Russia and Belarus due to the war in Ukraine.
The United States, on the other hand, faced no consequences after invading Iraq in 2003, in what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan admitted was an illegal war of aggression that violated the United Nations Charter.
US wars following September 11, 2001 caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Despite these exorbitant death tolls and wars of aggression, the United States was not barred from the Olympics.
Furthermore, Israel was allowed to participate in the 2024 Olympics, as its far-right regime brutally bombed Gaza in what UN experts have recognized to be a genocide.
Israel’s Western-backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, although the United Kingdom has tried to prevent the Hague from issuing an arrest warrant.
Israel’s team was in fact given special treatment at the 2024 Olympics, instead of being banned like Russia’s had been. The French government provided Israeli athletes with 24-hour protections teams.
The blatant political bias of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is less surprising when one sees who sits on its executive board.
The IOC lists 16 executive board members on its website. Of these 11, or 69%, are from Western countries – despite the fact that the West only represents around 14% of the world population.
Just five members of the committee are from the Global South, although they all represent countries that are Western allies and are largely subordinated to the political interests of the Global North: Argentina, Fiji, Jordan, the Philippines, and Singapore.
The president of the IOC executive board is German, while its vice presidents are Australian, Dutch, Spanish, and Singaporean. The director is Belgian, and other members are from Italy, Finland, Norway, Serbia, and Switzerland.
The only African member of the IOC executive board, Kirsty Coventry, is a descendant of a white settler family in Zimbabwe, who spent part of her athletic career in the United States.
Although Africa has a population of more than 1.5 billion people, no other Africans are represented on the IOC executive board.
Current IOC Vice President Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs is the son of the body’s former longtime president, Juan Antonio Samaranch Torelló, a hard-line, unreconstructed fascist.
Samaranch Torelló, who led the IOC from 1980 to 2001, was a devoted supporter of Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco. When Franco died in 1975, Samaranch Senior proudly referred to himself as “one hundred per cent Francoist”.
In Spain, the IOC’s ex President Samaranch was publicly denounced as a “Nazi opportunist”.
Ben Norton is a journalist and analyst whose work focuses primarily on geopolitics, international political economy, and US foreign policy. He lived in and reported from Latin America for several years, and is now based in Beijing, China.