RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Olympic sport is worthless if you cannot believe your eyes – so why do Russian dopes keep being invited to the party?

Dogs seem to have a mixed reputation in Russia. I know this because it came up quite a bit during a surreal time in my life and came back to mind this week when it was announced that Kamila Valieva had been given a four-year ban for doping.

Dogs were the insult par excellence in February 2022, as I look back on the days that followed when I asked a question to Valieva, who was then a 15-year-old child at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

It was clumsy in the wording, too cold, but unfortunately justified by astonishing circumstances – was she a beautiful athlete?

It was delivered in the interview room after her training session on a Friday afternoon, when a skater like no other had experienced a week as unique as the athlete herself: a groundbreaking gold medalist on Monday, a medal ceremony canceled on Tuesday, whispers of a sinister rode on Wednesday, hounded by cameras on Thursday and confirmed by the International Olympic Committee that he had failed a drug test for a banned heart drug on Friday morning.

Her quadruple jump, an act of grace and sporting brilliance never before seen in the Olympics, had become a raging tornado in four days.

Since no one from her team chose to accompany her as she rushed past the media that afternoon, she was left alone to deal with everything. Perhaps we can draw a conclusion here about the sloppiness with which the Russians are handling these crises, and thank God they have had enough practice by now.

But the point is this: the senior coaches and staff we most wanted to ask were nowhere to be seen. Hide. Cowering behind a child in the eye of a scandal that captured worldwide attention.

I’m still conflicted about the question, or specifically the bluntness of the words to someone so young, but the response that followed was quite revealing in its own way.

That’s where things got weird, and it’s also where the dogs come into play: the first wave featured the five mutts posing as Russian “journalists” simultaneously performing as part of the team ensemble.

They immediately took a photo of my accreditation and posted it online. That soon brought the second wave of bot accounts under Russian names on Twitter.

They’re a common tool in Russia and elsewhere, and you may know the kind: no photo, a handful of followers, but good for creating enough buzz that real people join in. It’s a trick that works and the response was strangely consistent.

You are a dog. Your mother is a dog. Father, dog. Dogs are better than you, dog. There were dozens of those dog messages, almost all in Russian, along with nearly a thousand others via social media and emails.

One asked if I liked eating baby pandas, but that’s a digression because elements of the Russian media picked up on this and the Western dogs asking questions became a significant part of their coverage. The why and how of the most remarkable and surprising doping case in Olympic history? As far as I could tell, they made a dog’s breakfast out of those bits.

But that’s the age-old story of distraction and diversion; it’s all part of the story where it’s never Russia’s fault. This week that extended to the Kremlin accusing the Court of Arbitration for Sport of a “politicized” decision against Valieva.

The Russian Olympic Committee went further, stating that “war has been declared on Russian sport,” which felt a bit rich. Irony? They’ll accept it if it makes a difference of a few tenths, I assume. In the Valieva case, we will never know with absolute certainty whether her positive test was an unconscious contamination or whether the Russians stooped so low as to anesthetize a child.

The full report on the entire unfortunate episode has not been published, but the court panel is said to have seen some merit in the possibility of an accident. It was based on Valieva’s legal team’s claim that her grandfather was taking medication for a heart condition and that they shared cutlery – it could explain how trimetazidine got into her system.

Cutting-edge science means that a positive finding is often turned into a place of ambiguity, the kind where definitive judgment is impossible and to which we are regularly led by clever lawyers. They earn their money. But sometimes there’s a complicated explanation for a complicated appearance, and sometimes it’s legitimately an accident. I hope for the sake of Valieva, a victim whichever way we cut it, that it was a dirty knife and fork.

But where is the confusion surrounding Russia at this stage? What benefit of the doubt can their sports system expect by now? And why, in an Olympic year, when sports suck if you can’t believe your eyes, would they continue to receive invitations to the party? I don’t believe they should do that. Not yet, actually. Not until they get through even one four-year cycle of summer and winter games without anyone falling over.

At this stage we could break it down and say that Valieva is just a contaminated pixel. But the bigger picture of Russian sport in this area is wider than the Bayeux Tapestry and more detailed than anything in the Louvre. It’s a bigger picture that has shone in fluorescent green over the past decade since we learned about Russian state-sponsored doping.

Some figures are easily available, but it is always worth summarizing them again – if we go back to 1968, 155 Olympic medals were stripped of Olympic medals during the summer and winter games for doping violations and 45 of the athletes were Russian – that is more than a quadruple of the second-place country. Since the 2008 Summer Olympics, they have accounted for 38 of the 101 medals recovered. Since London 2012, there are 24 out of 52.

We can express ambiguities and refer to other nations. We could also talk about the very questionable ethics of those within the British system surrounding the London Games. Or the positive result of CJ Ujah in Tokyo. But since the 1980s, no one has done it as well as Russia.

We know how their corruption peaked during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. We know of mouse holes in the wall of their anti-doping laboratories through which dirty urine was exchanged for clean one before and during those Games. About systematic embezzlement and non-cooperation in the investigations that followed after they were tampered with. We also know very well about a Russian doping mastermind turned whistleblower, Grigory Rodchenkov, who to this day lives in fear of assassination and once said that trimetazidine was a drug of choice within the regime.

It is clear that today’s landscape is not the same as it was back then. And yet, given Valieva’s situation, two of the past three medals taken in the Olympic sector came from Russians and post-date the avalanche. Accidents?

Maybe. And it’s entirely possible that the dog ate Valieva’s homework.

But she raises a few more questions that the Twitter bots won’t like: Why always? And why should we continue to tolerate this?

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