For Congress, Doping Violations in the Chinese Olympic Program Are a Job for the FBI. As for Sexual Abuse in Our Own … We’ll Get Back to You.

by Irvin Muchnick

The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – yes, there is such an entity – wants the FBI to investigate allegations of cheating with performance-enhancing drugs by China’s Olympic teams. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/us/politics/chinese-swimmers-doping-congress.html.

Meanwhile, it’s three months since the congressional Commission on the State of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee published a report, four years in the making. The commission consisted of such athletic luminaries as legendary high jumper Edwin Moses and gold medalist swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar. Their report recommended the first fundamental reform of the American sports system since the Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act, 46 years ago.

Proposals include addressing the persistence of widespread coach sexual abuse of underage athletes. The two key ones would divorce grassroots programs in sports such as swimming from the Olympic Committee’s control, and turn the already mistrusted and disgraced new U.S. Center for SafeSport into an independent federal agency.

The congressional commission has received almost no attention; the New York Times, for example, hasn’t covered the report at all. This is in keeping with the report’s own analysis that the cobwebbed 1978 legislation, putting both elite and more casual extracurricular programs under the authority of the Olympic Committee, and its equally sponsor-, broadcast rights-, and medal haul-driven national sport governing bodies, was a product of Cold War thinking.

The American Olympic movement, the commission said, is “in dire need of systemic change. In recent years, it has faced a reckoning over widespread abuse of athletes and associated cover-ups,” the most important of multiple problems. Many of them are attributable to particular values, what the report termed “a broader effort to demonstrate the success of America’s system of democracy” through the Olympics, leading to “an increased sense of the stakes in competition between American and Soviet-bloc athletes.”

In our new Cold War, China has joined or even replaced Russia as the leading boogeyman for transposing geopolitical rivalry to sports.

As for the relationship between the Olympic Committee and the twin offshoot issues of doping and sexual abuse, consider the career of Travis Tygart, CEO of the quasi-independent U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Before joining the staff of USADA, Tygart was a lawyer at the law firm now called Bryan Cave. There, Tygart helped cover-up sexual abuse cases at USA Swimming.

Irvin Muchnick’s bookUNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe will be published after the Paris Olympics by ECW Press.