Russia Track and Field, Banned From Rio, Will Hold Its Own Competition

Yesterday, VICE Sports ran a Q&A with sports historian David Goldblatt who implored us to think of alternatives to the current Olympic model. "How can it be otherwise? What else would we like? It's a spring to the imagination."

Russia must have read our Q&A, because today, the head coach of Russian athletics told Russian news agency TASS that all of the country's banned track and field athletes will hold their own competition in Moscow.

If, like me, you heard the news and thought, "How soon can I get to Moscow?" the answer is: not soon enough. The Doping Olympics are tomorrow.

Hopefully, this is just a test run for Russia to launch an Olympics of their very own, which has plenty of precedent. In the interwar period, socialist parties and trade unions held the International Workers' Olympics as an alternate to the Olympic Games, which, at the time, was very much into the whole amateurism thing. The Vienna edition in 1931 had some 250,000 spectators, making it a much bigger event than the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In the 1960s, Indonesia launched the delightfully named Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) for "emerging nations" to challenge the IOC's exclusive tendencies while run by American and noted racist Avery Brundage. Quite progressively, GANEFO's platform made clear that politics and sport were inseparable, an idea which the IOC then rejected (they have ever so slightly softened up a bit on this front under their current president, Thomas Bach). At the time, the People's Republic of China and other socialist states found it difficult or impossible to gain IOC acceptance, since the IOC was almost entirely run by Western aristocrats. 2,700 athletes competed at the 1963 games from 51 nations, but only those previous banned by the IOC sent official delegates for fear of IOC reprisal. GANEFO collapsed as the IOC opened up to socialist nations.

Perhaps most famously, the Soviets held the Friendship Games in 1984 for themselves and other nations that boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. About 50 states took part, including some nations which sent athletes who failed to qualify for Los Angeles.

While tomorrow's Doping Olympics are hardly this extensive, one can only hope they're a precursor to future events. Maybe the thing the IOC needs most is competition.