My two cents.
Its disgusting how Rodchenkov is being trotted around like some saint. The guy learned his craft in Canada. Started a criminal enterprise in Russia then took a pound a silver to push lies when drug dealers were about to kill him.
WADA is being used as a geopolitcal weapon and the whole McClaren report which has been treated like the bible is a politcal sham casting wide nets of guilt with no real evidence.
This has created basically a circle jerk. The McClaren report is used as the sole evidence but has no evidence. A good defense attorney would absolutely destroy McClaren on a court stand.
A couple sports feds that are run like a manor by British Russophobes (IAAF, IPC) then blanket ban athletes for their ethnicity with no real evidence or due process. Robbing medals from athletes like Isinbayeva with a spotless record.
One of the main guys orchestrating the attacks and another one more behind the scenes are Travis Tygart and Paul Melia.
One of Travis Tygarts political stunts that royally pissed me off is this past Winter when he gave athletes worked up with Russia hysteria a script of BS to post on social media talking about how they are worried about their security, their food being tampered with etc. This then pressured the moving of a few events.
Tygart only orchestrated that scheme on a few events while ignoring the other 80% of Winter events hosted in Russia. Anyone with any sense of logic and decency would point out how incredibily disengenous that is.
Heres the thing though. These political attacks reached the laws of diminishing returns long ago. The powers that be are trying to milk it as long as they can for two major reasons. 1) Russia is building the strongest most transparent anti doping system. This is going to make it impossible for the Western elite to do an attack like this in the future. 2. WADA, IAAF and their heads are trying to distract from the various scandals they find themself. it.
One of the things nobody ever brings up is at the 2014 Olympics most of the medals were won by figure skaters and two foreigners Vic Wild and Victor Ahn.
Sliding sports are super technical and theres a benefit from practing on the home track a million times. Russias top skeleton guy is generally considered the first or second best in the world.
In hockey, speed skating, biathlon, cross country sking Russia did average or below average.
But I think for some of the people behind the attacks or supportive of them there is some sort of big believe that Russia's sporting performance would be harmed by this. It hasn't been the case. Across the board Russia has had a lot of success the last year plus.
Look at the recent World Aquatic Games. Despite all the political harrassment and scrutiny Russia actually did way better in this one than the previous one which was hosted in Russia a couple years ago.
Lets talk about Efimova who earlier posts have demonized. Do you realize what the facts of her case really are. She took a GNC suppliment that happend to have DHEA in it. Hell, I saw DHEA at Walmart the other day for a few bucks. She got over a year ban for that.
And she took the politically banned Meldonium BEFORE it was banned. Thats it. The story should be how WADA poltically banned something without doing any trace studies and then helped hurt the reputation of athletes who did nothing wrong.
Under pressure from Tygart the IOC then put a directive in their ruling stating that any Russian who ever failed a test would not be allowed to compete. How can the IOC not know this is a blatant violation of their own charter? So then athletes a week before the games had to go to court and that was thrown out because it was an obvious violation of the charter.