Anyone who's delved into this situation regarding Russia, the IOC, WADA, and the CAS knew this decision was coming today.
Anyone who's understood that Vladimir Putin is the most powerful man in the world over the course of the last 8+ years knew this decision was coming today.
The Council for the Arbitration of Sport completed what it started when it nullified most of the athlete penalties for Sochi: Doping's legal in Olympic sport. You just have to "do it right".
I'll get to the two major American ramifications of that, before anybody thinks I'm letting the US doping situation or the United States Sexual Assault Committee off the hook.
WADA has already condemned the Russians for the utterly deliberate act of not marking the relevant samples as urgent enough to get proper testing done from their national championships on Christmas before the Games.
Valieva is underage, and has apparently been getting cycled off the drug program so she tests out for the first part of the mission of rewriting figure skating in the Russian image.
All of these are deliberate acts, and they come from the propaganda arm of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin.
Anyone who wants to tell you otherwise is not only ignorant of the truth, ignorant of the history of this entire affair over the last eight years with the CAS, and ignorant of the same situation rising in Russian agents in the United States such as IQ45 Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the entire Alternate Facts crowd.
A lot of people have asked each other how the Russian athletes are allowed to compete under any flag, that the entire exercise is a farce and a slap in the face to the Games...
There's an answer to that, and a lot of it goes to how many medals have actually been annulled from the Sochi Games of the Russian drug regime.
The IOC, after the McLaren report, disqualified over 40 Russian athletes from the Olympic movement. The appeal to the CAS not only restored the eligibility of over two-thirds of that number, and all of them after the Sochi Games...
... but reduced the total medal nullification total from 13 of the 29 Russian medals in the event down to just THREE.
What the CAS has now ruled, a second time, is that you can absolutely dope in world sport -- you just need to do the right tap-dances and the right screwing around to ensure that no fair result can ever be achieved in the world court of the CAS.
This means there's no feasible way, unless you go to the sloppy American method of an inherent wink-and-nod athlete-by-athlete basis, to police doping. Vlad Putin is a lot of things: STUPID IS NOT ONE OF THEM. As the old song goes, he knows all the rules and he knows how to break them...
(And once the QSA takes hold int he next 1-3 years, I fully expect to see a similar program instituted here by the Russian agents who will run the show for the next foreseeable amount of time.)
The other problem: This now renders impossible any large-scale outside investigation disqualifying the United States from the Olympic movement for the pervasive sexual assault and harassment of athletes as at least an inherent condition of selection to the team.
The United States Sexual Assault Committee is now just as legal as the Russian doping.
Good luck, world. At minimum, they need to shitcan the remainder of the figure skating -- and I would not blame Athlete One for leaving Beijing now.
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