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Bad Guys, Dopes, and the Olympics: David Roth's Weak In Review

The pompous global self-importance of the Olympics doesn't make them any less fun to watch. Neither, really, does their corruption. In some sense, it even brings us together.
Illustration by J.O. Applegate

There is no way that someone spending that much time, around that much urine, does not have a moment of clarity at some point. It may not have lasted long—it couldn't have, just for practical reasons relating to how much urine needed to be handled, and how quickly—but somewhere in there, someone who was passing clean urine samples through a wall to Russian athletes, or destroying those same athletes' ultra-tainted samples, had to have had the thought. "What," this person probably wondered, while holding some disturbingly warm little plastic cup in his or her (hopefully) gloved hand, "exactly is it that we're doing here? I am seriously spending all day just hustling piss nonstop, and I am presumably a doctor or a scientist or someone robustly qualified in some non-urine field of endeavor or other. How did it come to this?" All reasonable questions, but not ones with easy answers. Anyway, there was urine to move.

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There is, somehow, always more urine to move. This is an Olympics thing, and specifically a Russia-related thing. As of earlier this week, Russia's sprawling program of doping and fraud, which came to light in a World Anti-Doping Agency report from November of 2015 (and which some important people almost certainly knew about much earlier) is also somehow the business of the United States Department of Justice. In 2012, the International Association of Athletics Federations estimated that 42 percent of elite Russian athletes had tested positive for doping; Evgenia Pecherina, a Russian discus thrower who later became a whistleblower on the program, put the number at 99 percent. That, as the expression would surely go if anyone had bothered to make up such a hideous expression, is a lot of urine.

Read More: Weak In Review: Between The NBA That Will Be And An NBA That Never Was

Whatever surprise or even scandal there once was in this sketchy sloshing orgy of plumply rotten elites and their piss-related shenanigans is, by this point, pretty well stale. This is a long and boring war we're in and one that is not confined to the Olympics. But the Olympics, by dint of their grand scale and metastatic grandiosity, are when and where we see it most clearly. With all due respect to FIFA's hilariously plummy gangsterism and posh corruption, there is nothing quite like the Olympics—no event more proudly self-regarding or more profoundly deluded, no greater gap between the public-facing puffed-up globalist sentimentality and the risible, outlandish piss-swapping scummery behind it.

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For all the many ways in which inequality warps our world and impacts our lives, it collapses all too readily into abstraction; we can see the way that our politicians dutifully mouth the batshit beliefs of their billionaire sponsors on both sides of every debate, but at some point that just becomes the discourse. The same goes for the NFL, which only makes sense as an expression of the moneyed kooks that comprise the league's ownership caste, but which at least makes not-sense in ways that are predictable once you remember the tics, biases, and mostly worthless values of the unshameable mega-rich weirdos in charge.

The nightmares-in-charge are bigger in the Olympics—true transnational elites, not the lucked-out dry-drunk scions of some real estate baron or reptilian local petro-crats that rule the NFL. And while the elites of the Olympics are just as petty and flubby and grasping as their local-market peers, they operate on an entirely different scale. The NFL thinks it's a nation-state, and behaves as such. The Olympics thinks it's the whole fucking world, and the scuzziness of its worst actors is scaled up to match. With all due respect to Jerry Jones and his creeplord rentier peers, they are not in the same universe as Vladimir Putin and his cronies.

Great job, everyone. Photo by Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports

The scale of the Russian doping enterprise, which went beyond the rudimentary provision of banned substances and destruction of tainted tests to include obstruction of justice on an international scale and an in-house sidebar in extortion, is staggering mostly because of how clearly it reflects the strangeness of the people up top. This is not to absolve the athletes of their responsibility in all this, but at the same time it is impossible to look at an operation of this scope and think that it is about the flexible ethics of some individual distance runner or speed skater or weightlifter.

There are, here as everywhere else in the world of global sports, the smudgy fingerprints of various sets of soft pink hands all over everything. In some cases, this is a matter of elites enriching themselves—the Olympics, right up until the moment they begin hymning universal values and the beauty of human possibility in the opening ceremony, are always driven by all manner of grifting and graft. Russia's cheating was done at the behest of the government, and proceeded with a zeal and attention to detail that one suspects would be difficult to find in that same government's approach to, say, providing healthcare or prosecuting crimes. It is a waste of herculean effort in pursuit of something astoundingly trivial—not to put too fine a point on it, but who fucking cares which country wins the most medals in a given Olympics, really?—and also extremely serious business to the creeps behind it. Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the Russian anti-doping agency that oversaw Russia's doping program, has fled Russia for the United States, and fears for his safety. The athletes-turned-whistleblowers that served as the sources for the blockbuster German documentary Geheimsache Doping, which is credited for spurring the WADA's investigation, have done the same.

This is not anyone's first rodeo, and the dedication of powerful people to the most trifling bullshit and vainglory is not a problem unique to Russia, but just because all this absurd venality isn't surprising doesn't mean there still isn't something shocking about it. For all the ethical and moral grossness of it—and here it seems worth noting that Russia was doping its athletes to the point where it threatened their health—this mostly just seems like a lot of work, and at very great expense, for something that doesn't really matter that much. If the people of Russia could choose a direction for concerted government action, it would almost certainly not be making sure some extravagantly juiced hurdler pisses clean, no matter what. If the people of Brazil could choose a way for their government to spend billions of dollars in a hurry, it would probably not be on a bunch of state-of-the-art aquatics facilities. That all matters a lot less than the strange priorities of the strange people who get to choose, and who reliably choose just this.

It's here, maybe, that the Olympics comes closest to delivering on its promise to Bring Us All Together—in the futile and selective enforcement of doomed laws, in all the compromised functionaries of all the rotten ministries, in the fussing and rhetorical bloat of various podgy acronymic agencies, and especially in the destructive, all-consuming pettiness and raw, dick-swinging recklessness of the people in charge, we really do see the world. All this busy-looking inaction and wild rot, the crushing executive pettiness and toothless bluster and whack-a-mole futility, is as familiar as it is strange, wherever in the world you are. The Games themselves are great, thankfully, even with all this scuzz at the margins. They need to be, because redeeming all this—which, somehow, they reliably do—is quite an ask.