Russia facing cold, hard reality of anti-doping era

So the Russian team finishes sixth in the overall medals count at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, with 15. By Russian -- and Soviet-era -- standards, that's dismal.

It's so poor that heads roll back home and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, chairing a meeting last Friday, says the government had spent about $117 million over the past three years preparing for Vancouver and declares, ominously, "Maybe the money was spent not on what was needed but instead on what someone wanted to spend it on."

Commentators and observers within Russia and elsewhere have speculated that perhaps cronyism and nepotism within sports circles there are to blame -- or possibly the failure of the Soviet system to adapt to 21st century realities.

The suggestion here is that maybe something else entirely is at issue.

Fact: Seven Russian track and field athletes received doping-related suspensions just days before the start of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Last July, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport extended the ban on the seven until 2011, saying it appeared they had been involved in "fraudulent manipulation" of their urine samples.

Fact: Eight Russian biathletes and cross-country skiers have been banned for doping-related reasons since the end of the 2009 season.

Fact: International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge disclosed before the Vancouver Games got underway that he had met with Russian President President Dmitry Medvedev about Russia's repeated doping violations.

Again: The IOC president met with the Russian president -- date, place and other details of the meeting not fully known -- and expressed concern about sports doping.

Not to say the Americans have any claim here to any sort of superiority -- the BALCO affair and baseball's woes manifest evidence of the extent of doping in recent years in the American sports scene -- but at no point did the IOC president reach out to President Bush or President Obama and say, sir, we have a problem.

It's sheer supposition about what else the IOC president said to the president of the Russian federation. But let's suppose, anyway: Given Russia's cheating history in recent years and given as well advances in the detection of doping, does it stretch the bounds of credulity to imagine Rogge suggesting both that any would-be Russian dopers were going to get caught in Vancouver and that the Russian authorities might thereby consider strongly the value of taking appropriate measures? Even if that meant fewer medals? Like, a lot fewer?

In 2007, when he was Russia's president, Putin played a key role in securing Sochi the 2014 Winter Games, and let us be clear on one point: The Russians are going to go all-out to win medals at home in Sochi.

One other thing: The Americans are going to be the No. 1 target of the Russian sports machine, reconfigured as it surely will be by 2014, and not only because American athletes topped the Vancouver medals tally, with 37. If an entire generation of young American viewers has grown up without the Soviet bear as Cold War sports proxy -- rest assured an older generation, one that vividly remembers those years, is in power in Russia now.

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One of the earliest lessons I learned in covering the Olympics is that when the Games are over -- they are, like, over. There's no sentimentality or melancholy. Over means finished, done, thanks very much and let's move on, the construction crews tearing stuff down even before the closing ceremony winds to an end.

Before moving on, though, and in particular turning to the Summer Games sports -- the World Indoor Track & Field Championships in just a few days in Qatar, for instance -- a few final thoughts about Vancouver:

-- Rogge called the 2010 Olympics "excellent and very friendly." It will be fascinating to see whether both descriptions stand the test of time. It also will be fascinating to see who else is going to be honest enough to say what I say now: Friendly, mostly, especially the volunteers. But everything has limits. Let's say, for instance, you were wearing "USA" gear and walking through the street parties on Granville Street, as a friend of mine was -- you might have had the feeling you were a Red Sox fan who had stumbled into a Yankee bar.

Which underscores the real issue: The Vancouver Games went far in addressing the chief problem in Torino in 2006, a lack of buzz. Even so, wasn't there something missing?

To answer the rhetorical question: Yes.

And that something is a key element in the best Games experience -- a sense that the whole world is in it, all together.

These 2010 Games were indisputably by and for Canadians. John Furlong, the head of the Vancouver 2010 organizing committee, was up-front about that all along and couldn't have been more explicit about it in his speech during the closing ceremony. He said then the Games were a "coming-out event for Canada," a Games "to give people a chance to share in something profoundly positive," and -- as I have written at NBCOlympics.com -- by "people" Furling meant "Canadians," the street parties a "beautiful kind of patriotism."

Ask anyone who was in Sydney in 2000 to compare and contrast those Games with Vancouver. The Australians for sure threw a party by and for Australia. But it was clear in Sydney that everyone else was invited to the party, too. You could hang out with everyone else in Darling Harbor and not feel it was anyone's patriotism. It was -- well, it was the Olympics.

-- Ski cross is even better than snowboard-cross.

-- The NHL ought to adopt Olympic rules. What a pleasure it is to watch hockey without fighting.

-- Like many disputes, the idea that NHL players won't take part in Sochi is all about positioning, leverage and money. Especially money -- as in what's it worth to the NHL to make it work?

-- Bill Marolt and the U.S. Ski Team, with 21 of the 37 American medals, deserve to be the focus of a Harvard Business School-type case study.

-- Bode Miller will take the rest of the ski season off to rest the right ankle he sprained in December, the U.S. Ski Team announced Tuesday. Two things: One, that Miller won three medals, one gold, on that ankle is all the more remarkable. Two, Miller had this to say, and no one deserves relax time more: "I feel like I accomplished everything I wanted to this season so it's nice to just be able to relax." (Read more...)

-- Lindsey Vonn's win last weekend gives her 32 career World Cup victories, same as Miller. She's banged-up, too, and deserves enormous, enormous credit.

-- So does Julia Mancuso. To not finish in the top-three in two years but come back the way Mancuso has done -- that is impressive but, given Mancuso and her big-game personality, not wholly unexpected.

-- Quote of the Games, issued before the action got started but arguably never topped, from U.S. snowboarder Graham Watanabe, asked what it meant to be on the 2010 U.S. team: "Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That's what it feels like."