By James Wilson
The big story in athletics is a massive indictment of Russia’s athletic establishment by the World Anti-Doping Agency – WADA. WADA accuses the Russians of systematically drugging their athletes with performance enhancing and other substances. It alleges this has been going on many years with the complicity – and under orders – of the Russian Government. Related charges include official spying on athletes and meetings of Russian and international officials. Russia is also accused of bribing and blackmailing its own athletes to perpetuate the practice. They have been suspected for decades, but WADA’s official action is the first of its kind. The International Association of Athletics Federations – IAAF – has promised to act swiftly on WADA Chair Dick Pound’s recommendation to bar all Russian competitors from international sports – including the 2016 Olympic Games – should the Russians fail to rectify the situation in time.
The day the story broke saw only defiance from Russia; they have since pledged cooperation with the process – for whatever value their pledge can hold at this point.
Additional scandals include indictments against senior officials of IAAF itself for engaging in bribery and extortion. Head of the Moscow test lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, is believed to have ordered destroyed nearly fifteen hundred test samples collected from Russian athletes and substitution of “clean” samples. The catalogue of misconduct goes on and on. It simply codifies an open secret in the world of elite athletics for decades – Russia is only the most notorious tip of the international iceberg – that winning at all costs is the god worshipped. Cheating, from corrupt judges to Lance Armstrong-style deception, is a favored method reaching the winners’ podium. Why is this so important?
Sport is iconic to every civilization on the planet. We human beings pump all of our strongest values and highest hopes into participation in athletics – as athlete or fan or both. The physics of throwing a baseball sixty feet from a predetermined release point with such and such a movement of the pitcher’s wrist so it arrives over the plate after course changes generated by spin and ballistics is a thing of symmetry and beauty. The extra effort of the basketball player who leaps a little bit higher for the rebound – or the lay-up – is inspiring. The football player who plays through pain, or finds the hole not there an instant earlier, or meets and catches the passed ball at the precise location the quarterback made inevitable the moment he let go the pass is a study in grace, intuition, and physical courage in the face of charging defenders. I have only scratched the surface of why we symbolize so much that is noble, creative, and spiritually animating in sport.
When sport becomes the realm of what we call elite athletics – the swift running, the endurance, the inner strength for one more put of the shot – the incredible discipline of the race walker who knows he will be disqualified if any part of his foot leaves the ground in a running motion yet dares not slow to a real walk – it is mind boggling. These young men and women teach themselves to ignore all but the discipline of their sport. Pain, relationships outside their vocational community, the threat of career ending injury at any moment – none of these things is permitted to distract from the goal of personal excellence, an unknown quantity until its ultimate limit is reached. This is the life of an Olympic hopeful.
Many athletes – more and more – understand God Who gifts as their apex. They run for Him – as Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame ran – and declined to run – when his Olympic heat occurred on a Sunday. Many athletes – more and more – make an idol of their athleticism. They run to win, not to serve the Winner of the World; cheating is a logical consequence wherever the idol is threatened with anything less than victory. But the athletes themselves are not the problem. Those who exploit and subjugate them are the problem. These Russian officials under indictment are the object of today’s attention, but systemic corruption is pervasive in the unredeemed portions of the world of sport.
Where drugs and enforced cheating are not an issue elite athletes are bullied and manhandled into an incredibly narrow spectrum of what it means to be a human being. These young men and women have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of personal excellence in a field of endeavor that captures the imagination of the multitudes. Their coaches and directors treat them like Pavlov’s dogs, demanding a statistical perfection of their bodies and body shape as much as perfection of effort. They have virtually no say in the standards – even the moral standards – against which they are measured. If they are injured in the pursuit of these often unrealistic goals they are simply dumped by the side of the road. Yet most business leaders will testify that employees with some freedom to create their own standards and goals are much more productive than those treated as mere creatures of the board room puppeteers. Athletic gurus need a clue.
Right now elite athletics is poised between the polarizing images of Eric Liddell on the one hand – extending body, mind, and heart in utter cohesion of self with the Father, Son and Spirit over his person and goal – and the ghoulish spectacle of this Russian perversion of person and goal in the sluttish addiction to medals and world records with zero regard for the cost in human life and character.
My prayer is that the scandal overtaking the Russian athletic establishment will be an occasion for radical reformation of the whole world of elite athletics – and indeed the world sporting pantheon. That means – for openers – putting to flight that idolatry of victory that makes cheating a necessary tool until exposure. But a thoroughgoing reformation will progress to re-imagine relationship between athletes and establishment that encourages each to be all he or she can be instead of shoe-horning them into people who know only graphs and computer programs about faster and higher and farther. And better yet will be the day rendering unto Ceasar ceases at the point of rendering unto God.
On that day sport will mature into the icon of humanity it was always intended to be in the mind and heart of the Creator and Redeemer of both sport and humanity.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@charter.net
