Tue, 02 Apr 2024 02:45:52 -0400WeeblyWed, 10 Jan 2024 18:33:53 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-51                                    MENTAL HEALTH, SPORTS, And OUR LEGAL SYSTEM
                                                                By John Weston Parry, J.D.
 
In college, I was drawn to two disciplines, government and psychology. I majored in the former; minored in the latter. My honors thesis examined sports, law, and American society. I chose law school over clinical psychology, but pursued a legal career focused on mental disability law and rights.

I maintained a keen interest in sports from a social justice perspective, however. When I retired as staff director of the ABA Commission on Disability Rights (formerly the Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law) and editor-in-chief of the Mental & Physical Disability Law Reporter, I began writing about sports.

I post essays for my website and blog, sportspathologies.com. I also write books as I had done at the ABA. First, was Mental Disability, Violence, Future Dangerousness: Myths Behind the Presumption of Guilt (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). Next was The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

This February, The Burden of Sports: How and Why Athletes Struggle with Mental Health will be published, again by Rowman & Littlefield. It combines my mental health law expertise with social justice issues affecting athletes. While the book is not focused primarily on law and rights, those topics appear throughout, including a chapter addressing how our legal system favors spectator sports organizations at the expense of athletes’ mental health.  

How Legal Favoritism Was Bestowed on Sports   

The story began nearly one-hundred and fifty years ago when professional baseball formed the National and American leagues so that those teams could operate as a cartel. Unless a baseball player was traded or released by his owner, he was bound to his team. Thus, professional baseball’s monopolistic practices were well-established before the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted in 1890. Those monopolistic practices also affected other aspects of the athletes’ employment from compensation to rules governing on and off-the-field conduct.

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ignored those oppressive employment conditions. In a logic-defying decision, the Court used a legal fiction to rule that those leagues were not governed by the Sherman Act because their teams did not engage in interstate commerce.

This preceded a series of special legal privileges that treated major spectator sports more like public charters even though their primary missions are to generate profits and build wealth for themselves and their commercial partners. Since then, Congress has enabled such legal favoritism by refusing, in most instances, to enact reforms to reign in these sports, leading to one scandal after the other, many negatively affecting the mental health and emotional well-being of their athletes.

The laissez-faire approach to enforcement has persisted even when people associated with these sports have skirted or violated civil or even criminal statutes. These legal privileges have encompassed labor relations, college athletics, substance abuse, gambling, civil rights, and criminal behaviors. The U.S. Center for Safe Sports protects only Olympic athletes and has been roundly criticized for failing in that mission.

Spectator sports privileges have been inflated when they are imposed upon people with mental health issues because of stigmas, stereotypes, and discrimination. For every public service message that expresses the reality that it is not unnatural for people to experience mental disturbances, there are more expressions that such behaviors are shameful, self-imposed, and presumably dangerous.
The legal system contributes to the shame and distress rather than acting as a shield to protect these people. Thus, it is not surprising that, although many more athletes are opening up about their mental health struggles, a majority keep quiet, fearing what will happen to them if their teammates, their fans, and the public find out.

Examples of Spectator Sport-Related Mental Health Neglect or Abuse  

Many of the worst examples in which a sport, with the help of the legal system, has sacrificed the mental health of its athletes have occurred in recent years. Arguably the most egregious are stories of sexual abuse of so many American female athletes, notably in gymnastics. As American Olympians these athletes were supposed to be protected by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which has enjoyed a public charter from Congress for decades. It is the only sports organization that enjoys such a distinction.

Under the USOPC’s watch, and that of Congress, hundreds of female athletes have been sexually and emotionally abused in a variety of Olympic sports. Those sports are supposed to protect not only Olympians, but all the other girls and women who participate, often at a very young age. Instead of active monitoring, organizations that govern these sports as well as our legal system have stood by as coaches and team doctors committed crimes against young female athletes with devastating consequences to the athletes’ mental health.

And, if these athletes participated in Olympic sports in college, they often were similarly neglected by their universities and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which have been given free reign by the legal system. This confluence of neglect and deference from the legal system is how dozens of male wrestlers at Ohio State were sexually abused by their team doctor, while their coaches, including current Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, and the university looked the other way. In the sports world, the organizations that are supposed to represent athletes typically prioritize their economic, administrative, and organizational interests.

Furthermore, the legal system continues to defer to sports organizations when they appear to be violating disability discrimination and mental health parity laws. There rarely is an investigation, much less litigation, when mental health-related rights of athletes are jeopardized or violated by teams, players’ unions, and other sports organizations purporting to represent the interests of the athletes under their protection.

Despite ample evidence of discrimination against athletes or former athletes in major American spectator sports with mental health and emotional difficulties, few court cases have been filed on their behalf. Golfer Casey Martin’s case, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, is a rare exception. Yet, the ruling in his favor against the PGA Tour to be allowed to use a cart because he had a degenerative leg condition, has had little impact. No other PGA player has received such an accommodation. Even Tiger Woods, when he severely injured his leg, did not ask for a cart. Instead, he tried to play in extreme pain, to the detriment of the entire golf world.

When professional athletes Royce White and Jonathan Martin reportedly experienced discrimination in the NBA and NFL, respectively, based on their mental conditions, nothing happened. Instead, both were drummed out of their respective leagues, in White’s case because his team would not properly accommodate his extreme anxiety about flying; in Martin’s because of his teammates’ extreme bullying.

Conclusion

Major sports organizations depend on lawyers to maximize advantages the legal system provides for them. Sometimes the lawyers are in law firms that are conducting so-called independent investigations when scandals arise. Mostly, those lawyers are in-house or on retainer. Generally, they excel at shielding the sports organizations that hire them from civil or criminal liability and legal entanglements. For spectator sports organizations, lawyers are as essential as public relations experts who “sportwash” away bad publicity, including the neglect of athletes’ mental health. ]]>Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:59:53 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-50WHY DID THE U.S.  WOMEN’S NATIONAL SOCCER TEAM FAIL TO MEET EXPECTATIONS AT THE                       WORLD CUP? It Was Not Because They Were Too “Woke” or “Anti-American”!

                                                                  By John Weston Parry, J.D.

A complete answer to the question of why the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) appeared to underperform at the 2023 World Cup has several plausible explanations, a combination of which were probably responsible for what happened. Former team member and likely hall of fame midfielder Carli Lloyd, who was an instrumental part of the last two American World Cup championships, observed “the team was disjointed, was not a unit and the coaching was not what the team needed.”

But that still begs the question of why her observations seemed to apply? It certainly was not as certain MAGA Republicans gleefully crowed that the American players had been defeated because they were “woke” and “anti-American.” If anything, the USWNT lost its focus because the men, who control their sport domestically and internationally—the U.S. Soccer Federation, FIFA and other national federations—continue to discriminate against and shortchange these world class female soccer players, even as the women’s World Cup and Olympic competitions have become more and more popular.

The shut up and just play the game mentality does not work well once athletes come to understand there is something more important at stake than just winning, whether it is racial justice for African American athletes or gender justice for elite female soccer players. As if on cue, the Spanish women’s team, which won the World Cup, had its celebration marred during the awards ceremony when Luis Rubiales, the head of its national football federation, felt entitled to plant an unwanted kiss on the mouth of star forward Jennifer Hermoso. Rubiales later had the gall to claim his misogynistic kiss was “consensual,” which anyone viewing the video could see it was not.  

A time line of notable events involving the USWNT from 2011 through August 2023  helps explain what undermined the American team’s World Cup chances in Australia and New Zealand. Much of the decline in their performance can be traced to how the team was mismanaged by the U.S. Soccer Federation (U.S. Soccer), and how women soccer players have been mistreated by FIFA and other international soccer federations. The American women chose to take a stand on behalf of all elite women soccer players, which no doubt distracted them from focusing just on winning games.   

In retrospect, it is amazing that the USWNT did as well as it had up until the 2023 World Cup. The American’s past success established expectations that failed to account for the obstacles the American team members had to contend with, not only on behalf of themselves, but also other world class women soccer players, internationally. Focusing on soccer alone was only an option if team members were willing to roll over in the face of many years of gender injustices in their sport.       

Such high expectations also did not account for the new reality that Spain, the team that ultimately prevailed, was playing the “beautiful” brand of fast moving and passing football, which has been associated with Brazil’s soccer dominance in the past. This was in sharp contrast to the more defensive-minded and bruising approach the U.S., Canada, and most other European teams have long embraced.

The obvious shortcoming of the American team going into the 2023 World Cup was their now aging and slower squad could not score consistently against strong teams, having to live or die, so to speak, in penalty kick shootouts. Against Sweden in the quarterfinals their championship run died with this highly defensive system, which can be blamed in large part on Vlatko Andonovski. He was the man U.S. Soccer chose to be the American team’s head coach, rather than making a more concerted effort to re-sign Jill Ellis, who had directed the team to impressive World Cup championships in both 2015 and 2019.          

The USWNT Time Line (2011-2023): Discrimination Distractions

From 2011 through 2015, the USWNT was by far the best team in the world, both talent-wise and by virtue of winning World Cups in 2011 and 2015, as well as Olympic Gold in 2012. Jill Ellis became the full-time coach of the team in 2014, after having served in an interim apprenticeship role before that. Of the eleven head coaches who have directed the women’s team since 1985, only three have received interim designations. All of them have been female.

When Ellis was hired, the American women were pushing the men’s team aside in terms of generating television viewers and media attention for American soccer. Yet, U.S. Soccer led by the now toxic Carlos Cordeiro, continued to compensate the women’s team inequitably, paying those female players much less than the players on the men’s squad.

This led a number of USWNT athletes to file a discrimination suit with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in April 2016 seeking equal pay. At the 2016 Olympics, the American women’s team, seemingly distracted by its labor dispute, faltered badly losing in penalty kicks to Sweden in the quarterfinals. That marked the first time the women’s team had not made the finals in the Olympics and the first time it had not reached the semifinals in any major international competition.      

In 2017, Cordeiro and U.S. Soccer pushed the USWNT into an ill-advised collective bargaining agreement that would significantly improve the salary and benefits of the women’s team, but still leave most of the players with compensation that would be much less than what the men would be receiving. Thus, in March 2019, just before that World Cup was to begin, members of the women’s team filed a federal lawsuit against U.S. Soccer and Cordeiro for gender discrimination. Nonetheless, an experienced, but not yet aging, USWNT squad won the 2019 World Cup, impressively.

Jill Ellis suddenly resigned, however, as head coach shortly thereafter, while in her coaching prime, but still being paid much less than what the male head coach of the American men’s team was making. Whether she would have stayed if she had been offered equivalent compensation as the men’s head coach is mere speculation, since Ellis has not discussed the matter publicly. Clearly, though, U.S. Soccer did not make much of an effort to get her to re-sign.

Instead, U.S. Soccer officials elected to replace Ellis with a relatively unknown male coach, Vlatko Andonovski, a Macedonian-American, who had little or no experience coaching women. They decided to pay him much more than Ellis, without making him do an interim apprenticeship, as they had with her. While Andonovski was the head coach, the USWNT would fail to meet expectations at every major international event the team played.

In March 2020, U.S. Soccer and Cordeiro filed a response to the American women soccer player’s law suit. The organization, while supposedly still representing the USWNT interests, went out of its way to disparage the quality of play of those female players and did so in blatantly sexist language. As a result of a public outcry condemning that inflammatory legal response, Cordeiro resigned in circumstances suggesting he was forced to do so.

In order the calm the waters, U.S. Soccer replaced him with a woman, Cindy Parlow Cone, who was a hall of fame soccer star on the USWNT during the 1990’s. The composition of the federation’s executive board, though, even with the addition of Parlow-Cone, remained overwhelmingly male, including the organization’s chief operating officer.

In July 2021, the American women’s team under Andonovski’s direction, lost in the Olympic semifinals to Canada 1-0 based on penalty kicks, meaning the American team did not score in regulation or extra time. Team members were still battling both U.S. Soccer and FIFA over equal pay and equal playing conditions on behalf of themselves and women soccer players on their national teams, globally. The American players’ advocacy, together with public outrage about what U.S. Soccer had done, led the American soccer federation, with Parlow Cone as its titular leader, to enter into a face-saving, but seemingly counter-productive, arrangement with the women players.

U.S. Soccer agreed to pay the men and women equally. They would be paid for each  international match they played using a “pay-for-play” formula, regardless of how the team performed. That agreement, of course, did not apply to women soccer players on other national teams, internationally. Instead, FIFA symbolically improved those athletes’ compensation, but most of those female soccer players still would only receive a fraction of what men were receiving to play in the World Cup and the Olympics.

Thus, when the 2023 World Cup began, only the players on  the USWNT were going to receive equal compensation compared to male soccer players. This suggested U.S. Soccer was more concerned with managing the bad publicity it had created, then establishing a supportive athletic environment for the American women going forward. With respect to motivating teams to do well, all the other national teams, which had earned the right to play in the women’s World Cup, had much stronger financial incentives to push them to perform. The USWNT’s share of the proceeds had been preset before they played any matches. That motivational difference may have contributed to the U.S.’s lackluster performance.  

Conclusion: The USWNT World Cup Team’s Composition and Direction  

More importantly, though, the American team, which was very good defensively, showed little offensive imagination under Andonovski’s direction. The squad’s starting lineup and key substitutes, by World Cup championship standards, was aging and had slowed down since 2019.  Throughout the group stage the U.S. struggled to score and was almost eliminated, except a shot on goal by Portugal in the final game of that preliminary round narrowly missed, hitting a goal post rather than going in. Despite being ranked as the world’s best team, the U.S. barely managed to finish second in its group of four teams, ahead of Vietnam and Portugal, but behind the Netherlands.

Then in the very next game, the quarterfinals against Sweden, the Americans were held scoreless in regulation and extra time. They lost in penalty kicks, which eliminated the USWNT from the World Cup earlier than ever before. Andonovski promptly resigned, leaving American soccer fans wondering what would come next .

A woman, Twila Kilgore, was appointed to temporarily replace Andonovski, but like Ellis she received an interim head coach designation. Kilgore probably will not end up  being the final head coach choice, despite, or perhaps because, she was the assistant head coach under Andonovski.

Once again, though, the male powers to be ruling American soccer imposed a double standard when it comes to hiring coaches for the women’s team. If they are male, they become head coach once they are hired. Should they be female, however, the likelihood is they will receive an interim designation first to see if they are good enough. Furthermore, even if they pass that test, it is very likely they will be paid substantially less than a male head coach would be.

One can only wonder how the 2023 USWNT World Cup squad would have been selected, been organized, been directed, and performed without the distractions, mistreatment, and mismanagement imposed upon them because they—as is true for most elite female athletes—play in a spectator sport predominantly controlled by men, rather than by women like themselves. The athletic outcome certainly could not have been any worse and probably would have been better. Moreover, it is likely the American players would have been much more content and, those who remain on the team, better prepared for the major international competitions ahead, including the Paris Olympics in 2024 and the 2027 World Cup, wherever it is played.       
]]>Tue, 23 May 2023 16:55:40 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-49IS The NATIONAL SPORTS BRAIN BANK ANOTHER NFL ATTEMPT To SPORTSWASH CTE And BRAIN DAMAGE To ITS FOOTBALL PLAYERS, WHO ARE MOSTLY BLACK?

                                                       John Weston Parry, J.D.

Mental health of athletes has become increasingly publicized in recent years, especially the brain health of professional football players. Joseph Maroon, a neurosurgeon, who has been a Pittsburgh Steelers’ consulting physician for nearly fifty years, and his NFL partner, Steeler’s majority owner and President Art Rooney II, have been instrumental in establishing the National Sports Brain Bank at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian Hospital, where Maroon has an office. Apparently, this sports brain bank, affiliated with the university’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, hopes to compete with and challenge the data and conclusions of the renown CTE Center at Boston University.

Unfortunately, there is a catch-22. By only pursuing and relying on the results of longitudinal brain damage studies, the new brain bank—like many big tobacco-funded studies in the past—will inevitably extend the period of time by many years in which information will be available to further prove football is dangerous to players’ health. Before this can even be done in Pittsburgh, though, that brain bank must register enough football playing brain donors in order to conduct reliable studies. CTE cannot now be accurately diagnosed in living human beings.

So far, the Pittsburgh U brain bank reportedly has two volunteers, former Pittsburgh Steelers’ star players, Jerome Bettis and Merril Hoge. In the meantime, the health of the mostly African American athletes, who populate the NFL, will continue to be placed at great risk. Furthermore, while these longitudinal studies are being conducted over many years, the already very high percentage (70%) of Black players in the NFL is likely to increase as a smaller percentage of children from more privileged white families want, or are allowed, to play football anymore.

What Is Known Already and The Need For “Independent” Research

The BU Center has found that over 90% of the hundreds of brains of football players they studied showed significant signs of CTE. Their sample was unavoidably biased because so many of the families, who were willing to donate the brains of their loved ones, said the football players had showed signs of cognitive decline before they had died. Nevertheless, the extremely high percentage of positive findings remains a stark warning about the likelihood of some sort of serious brain damage to many professional, college, high school, and youth football players. Back in 2010, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association already was warning doctors and the public that “single or repeated blows on the head… cause multiple concussion hemorrhages.”  The more years athletes play football, the greater the probability their brains will be repeatedly concussed or sub-concussed.

Ann McKee, who is the lead neuropathologist at the BU CTE Center and an international authority, has issued more recent and dire warnings based on numerous preliminary studies that have been conducted. She also has acknowledged the unavoidable bias in how the brains at the BU Center were selected. Thus, she and her colleagues have been conducting longitudinal studies to better account for such bias and produce more meaningful epidemiological data. Longitudinal data will not change the reality that football is dangerous to brain health, but may provide more meaningful data about who is most at risk and how that damage can be best managed with aggressive monitoring and treatment, which generally is not happening now.

Such longitudinal data will only be reliable, however, if these studies are carried out independently, especially from the NFL’s influence. As Gil Rabinovici, who directs the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California, put it in Ken Belson’s excellent piece in The New York Times, “this type of research is best conducted when the funders and investigators are free of any potential conflicts.” Such independence is lacking with the University of Pittsburgh’s National Sports Brain Bank.

The National Sports Brain Bank’s Lack of Independence

Dr. Maroon has garnered headlines and quizzical looks from other neurological experts in the past for taking the extreme position that CTE in football players is “over-exaggerated” and actually a “rare” occurrence. He is a long-time member of the NFL’s thoroughly discredited Head Neck and Spine Committee, which for years has tried to deflect from and cover-up brain damage and CTE in NFL specifically and among football players more generally.

Art Rooney II in recent years has been the chief defender of the NFL’s and his family’s Rooney Rule, which has largely failed to bring racial equality to the hiring of NFL head football coaches. Rooney also is a member of the the NFL’s Health and Safety Committee, an oxymoron if there ever was one. In addition, former Steelers running back Merril Hoge, who is a vocal supporter of the Pittsburgh brain bank and an initial brain donor volunteer, co-authored a book entitled “Brainwashed: The Bad Science Behind C.T.E and the Plot to Destroy Football.”

Moreover, much of the funding for the sports brain bank will come from the Chuck Noll Foundation for Brain Research. Belson describes that foundation as a “charitable arm” of the Pittsburgh Steelers, which created the charity in memory of “the former Steelers head coach who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease before his death.”.   

The purpose and motivations behind the creation of this national brain bank to conduct CTE and other brain damage research is at least suspicious, if not clearly biased towards discrediting any information about football players that has or might harm the NFL. That said, gathering more epidemiological data as to the factors which may contribute to the development of CTE and other forms of brain damage, including the estimated number of head hits, number of years playing a contact sport like football, genetic influences, preexisting mental conditions, and the impacts of long term Covid and substance abuse, would be important to account for in scientifically rigorous ways.

As neuropathologist Julia Kofler, who will oversee the sports brain bank at the University of Pittsburgh, explains: the “threshold” for developing CTE is largely unknown, as is the question why certain individuals appear to succumb with “very minimal pathology.” These open questions deserve to be answered, but not to the exclusion of taking aggressive steps now to warn and protect football players, and youths contemplating whether to play football.            

Who gathers that data and ultimately interprets the answers to these questions, is critical to the scientific process, however. As Rabinovici explains, “in science, you look for independent replication with different groups studying the same scientific questions using different methods.” The independence of the National Sports Brain Bank has been tainted by the CTE skeptics and NFL football promoters who have pushed it forward and provided much of its funding.  

Dr. Koffler will be challenged to insure that the data obtained and the conclusions drawn from the National Sports Brain Bank are truly independent. It will be up to neuroscientists at Boston University and elsewhere to try to ensure that the published results from that brain bank are independently determined and scientifically valid and reliable.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that this will happen or even if it does, that the NFL and its sponsors will not rely on scientifically questionable results to continue to sportwash CTE and brain damage in order to protect their multi-billion dollar investments. If one had to select the least independent group to fund and support research on CTE and brain damage among athletes, it would be one closely affiliated with the NFL.

The Pittsburgh Steelers are a particularly questionable choice. It was their Hall of Fame former center Mike Webster, whose truly awful CTE-infused death in 2002 at the age of 55, jump-started the movement to more closely examine the obvious link between playing football and brain damage among NFL players. Such damage is attributable not only to concussions, but, more ominously, all the repeated sub-concussive impacts that every football player experiences on a regular basis. Studies indicate that in general the longer athletes play football, the greater the risks to their brains.

Conclusion: The Heavy Toll on NFL Football Players, Most of Whom Are Black

Yet, the Steelers chose to heavily fund Alzheimer’s research in the name of Chuck Noll in 2016, rather than football-related CTE and brain damage research in the name of Mike Webster. Now that there has been so much bad publicity surrounding brain damage among professional and college football players, apparently the Steelers, and presumably the NFL, want to expand the brain research they fund in order to better control the narrative and substantially delay reporting any definitive conclusions.

In the meantime, professional football increasingly will be played by African American athletes who have more limited opportunities to be successful elsewhere in society. The percentage of white athletes playing football at the youth, high school, and college levels has been shrinking since 2010. Male children in more privileged families are continuing to find other sports outlets and other activities to participate in rather than play football.

Thus, the pool of athletes from which football players can be drawn will continue to shrink, leaving a disproportionate percentage of African American athletes, who are dropping out at a much slower rate, to fill rosters. Surprisingly, if not shockingly, very soon the NFL will likely surpass the NBA in terms of the percentage of Black athletes in the two respective leagues.

​Because of this demographic reality, brain banks and longitudinal CTE research will only tend to worsen preexisting racial inequalities in professional football, especially because those brain studies take many years to complete. This will give the NFL more time to kick the athlete mental health can down the road, as its increasingly Black league of players become more brain damaged, even if they do not yet show obvious symptoms. 
]]>Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:51:17 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-48The Ugliness of Sportswashing: Brain Damage to Athletes; and Out of Control Sports Betting
                                                                      By John Weston Parry, J.D.
 
Sportswashing Reconsidered

While “sportswashing” has become widely recognized only recently, propaganda has been a spectator sports tool since athletic competitions were first organized into formal structures with the ancient Greek Olympics. Throughout American history, propaganda has been an important means to promote spectator sports, stifle opposition to the uglier sides of these sports enterprises, and cover up transgressions and misdeeds committed by individuals or entities affiliated with those sports.
 
An overriding purpose of sportswashing has been to convince national, state, and local governments to view spectator sports, and by association the individuals and organizations that they are affiliated with, as being particularly worthy of a special public status. In these sportswashed narratives, spectator sports are supposed to be viewed as something all people need and enjoy, much like art, music, and July 4th celebrations. Reportedly, the most expensive, publicly supported sporting event in the United States is the Super Bowl. 
 
The downside of these seemingly noble, sportswashed sentiments become apparent when the organizations that control, and benefit—either politically or economically—from spectator sports, misuse that special status to serve their own needs, over the welfare of the public and/or the athletes they are supposed to represent. There is a fundamental difference between ideals of sports competitions and the values and behaviors of those individuals and entities that benefit, politically or economically, from holding these sports competitions. In that sense, sportswashing is propaganda to make it appear that there is little difference between what these sports organizations do in the name of promoting their sports and the higher ideals of sports competitions.
 
Once that impression is firmly in place, the illusion becomes difficult to dispel. It provides cover for many offenses that these sports organizations commit in the name of the sport and the athletes they are supposed to represent. The legal system too often adds to this problem by allowing these sportswashed organizations to govern themselves with minimal governmental oversight. In recent times, two of the ugliest manifestations of this sportswashed, laissez faire approach have been widespread brain damage to athletes and out of control sports gambling.
 
Brain Damage to Athletes
 
Overview
Without a sufficient reservoir of elite athletes there can be no spectator sports. The fewer elite athletes that are participating, the more tenuous these sports become, as we saw up close during the height of the Covid pandemic. A similar dynamic is playing out, albeit to a lesser extent, in contact sports that produce brain damage or suspected brain damage to the athletes that play these sports.
From a strictly mercenary, economic perspective, it is understandable why there have been concerted efforts, both domestically and internationally, to sportswash brain damage to athletes participating in these sports, while over promoting and over selling possible mitigating measures to minimize mounting health consequences. In today’s world, where perceptions are established and perpetuated by social media as much as, or maybe even more so than, the scientific method, sportswashing and other propaganda tools have become increasingly widespread.

Efforts to manufacture or change perceptions in sports are likely to intensify as scientists come closer to establishing a reliable test for diagnosing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in athletes while they are still alive. Denials and deceptions about the risk of brain damage will be much more difficult to accept or justify, especially by parents of younger athletes. 

The most influential global sportswashing effort to change scientific perceptions about the established link between brain damage and lucrative contact sports has been by a relatively obscure, but persuasive and influential, group known as the Leaders of the International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport. Their efforts are in addition to the deceptions and misinformation disseminated by individual contact sports, most notably the NFL and NHL in North America. Overall, the approach has been analogous to the strategies and tactics that were employed by tobacco companies to first deny and then marginalize known health risks of cigarettes and other tobacco-based products.

The International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sports
Every four years, throughout this century, a conference has been held internationally—except the sixth, the most recent one, which was delayed due to the Covid pandemic—to purportedly reach a consensus about the science surrounding the effects of concussions on athletes. After each of the first five, the so-called conference leaders issued findings based on their subjective interpretations of the evidence presented in the various conference papers and presentations. Those findings have been used to help develop economically friendly medical and administrative protocols by various sports organizations for diagnosing, treating, and handling potential brain damage to their athletes. The NCAA, World Rugby and FIFA, are some of the more prominent organizations directly involved, while representatives of many other sports organizations have participated in other questionable ways.

At the past five conferences, organized by the Concussion in Sport Group (CISG), CISG leaders opted to discount the connection between contact sports and concussions by embracing a variety of other possible explanations. They have done this despite mounting evidence to the contrary, much of which was presented at their own conferences. This past March, Dr. Paul McCrory, the former CISG Chair, was forced to resign before the recently concluded sixth conference was held because he was found to have plagiarized an article he had written for the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM).

That publication conducted a thorough investigation into McCrory’s academic writings. As a result, according to The Guardian, the BJSM had to retract “nine more of his articles, and added expressions of concern to another 74.” Over a number of years, McCrory was instrumental in producing several of the conference’s consensus statements. In addition, he helped to make and influence decisions about “the credibility and quality of everyone else’s research.”

With McCrory out of the picture, many scientists affiliated with the conference expressed hope that things had changed for the better; that a new consensus would “acknowledge the clear and considerable body of evidence of the causal link between CTE and repeated head impacts.” Not everyone was so hopeful.

Ann Mckee, a neuropathologist at Boston University, who is generally recognized as the leading CTE expert not only in the U.S. but globally, elected not to attend the conference. As Ken Belson reported in The New York Times, “she was told her work would not be fully integrated into [the consensus] statement.” As it turned out, McKee misgivings were well-founded. The new leaders of the proceedings “signaled that [the conference] would continue its long practice of casting doubt on the connection between the ravages of head trauma and sports.”

Dr. Grant Iverson, a Harvard neuropsychologist, who co-authored the conference’s position on head trauma’s long-term impacts, opined that it was “extraordinarily naive” to “think there is [only] one factor… contributing to [athletes’] current problems” associated with brain damage. In one of the culminating sessions, Iverson reviewed which papers were going to be considered in drafting the consensus statement, afterwards. Belson reported that “of the 7,500 papers on concussion that the group identified…, only 26” were considered and none of them “include[d] any of the major research papers on CTE.”

As Chris Nowiski, a neuroscientist and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation explained, the “problem is, if they say cause-and-effect is established, it will cost the [sponsors] of the conference a lot of money in lawsuits.” There appear to be clear conflicts of interest, Belson concluded, because the most affected sports provide much of the money for both the conference and concussion research. The NFL appears to have used a similar game plan in populating its Head, Neck, and Spine Committee with medical professionals sympathetic to the league; then paying them well, so they do not want to be replaced by biting the hands of the owners who are feeding them.

Sports Gambling Gone Wild

Overview   
While there were numerous factors that led to a popular consensus across America—and then on the Supreme Court—to expand sports gambling, one of the most significant was Rotisserie Baseball. Beginning in the 1980’s, it helped legitimize waves of various fantasy leagues, which fundamentally changed America’s relationship with sports gambling.

By the mid-1990’s, there were a slew of different fantasy games of chance, involving numerous professional and college athletic competitions, especially involving football and basketball. Fantasy gaming pursuits originated as friendly leagues of individuals, but relatively soon became online competitions of chance managed and manipulated by wealthy corporations that utilized off-shore accounts to avoid taxes and domestic regulations. In the process, those corporate entities built powerful sports gambling infrastructures.

The unregulated expansion of gambling through fantasy sports became common place. It appeared inevitable that sports gambling would stage a massive move to expand in America, once fantasy leagues, fantasy betting, and NCAA Basketball Tournament office pools became integral components of athletic competitions for many sports fans.

In 2018, a case challenging federal sports gambling restrictions came to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the Department of Justice in the Trump Administration decided not to oppose the widely popular spread of sports gambling throughout the United States, choosing to leave it up to the states, much like abortion is being handled now. The Justices agreed to strike down the federal Professional and Amateur Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA).

Justice Alito, writing for the Court, effectively derailed federal prohibitions on sports gambling after more than 25 years of settled regulation. He opined that going forward “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own.” The gambling fat cats were out of the bag, and about to lap up all the cream. Congress was not willing or prepared to interfere.

In his dissent, Justice Breyer, quoting from the 1991 Senate Report supporting PASPA, warned that “widespread sports gambling w[ill] `threate[n] to change the nature of sporting events from wholesome entertainment for all ages to devices for gambling.’” Breyer may well have underestimated the extent of the resulting damage.

As Norman Chad, a former gambling addict, wrote in his Washington Post column some years ago, the “house almost always wins.” Unfortunately, the house has been wining, not only against those who bet compulsively, but against the public, state legislatures, and the leagues and other sports organizations that have decided to enable, and benefit from, this greed.

What Has Happened Since Sports Gambling Was Allowed to Expand
Formerly, all the major American sports enterprises were dead set against sports gambling, at least in their public personas. They voiced fears about the fixing of games and the corrupting influences of shady characters in the gambling world. Many sports had been victimized by gambling scandals in the past.

Just before the Supreme Court issued its opinion, and shortly afterwards, major American sports entities took what has been described as a nuanced approach—which others might call hypocritical. In general, they professed concerns about legalization, while at the same time prepared to maximize the benefits of sports gambling for themselves and the individuals affiliated with their sports.

Over the next several years, thirty-two American state jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, enacted legislation allowing sports gambling of some kind. Five more have passed statutes that will enable sports gambling soon. The best and most in-depth reporting about how this “boom” occurred and why it has led to a “sports betting onslaught,” which states were negligently or even recklessly unprepared to deal with, was presented in a series of articles that ran around Thanksgiving week in The New York Times.

It was not long before all the major spectator sports were on board, including many athletes, trying to figure out ways to lap up more of the cream, along with the sports gambling fat cats. The N.Y. Times reported that lobbyists representing the gambling industry and its allies, like “Fan Duel and Draft Kings, along with major professional sports teams,” descended upon state legislatures in what became “the largest expansion of gambling in United States history.”

These sports gambling interests made millions of dollars of contributions to local lawmakers’ election campaigns. They also promised states huge tax windfalls from sports betting that often were overblown, or conversely resulted in huge tax rates on those who placed sports bets. New York, which instituted a 51 percent tax rate, in the first ten months of this year alone hauled in “$546 million.” That represents about 50 percent of all sports betting state tax revenues nationwide, leaving all the other sports betting jurisdictions to fight for what is left.     

The biggest problem, though, is that pro gambling lobbyists were successful in passing enabling legislation in many states that included little or no oversight. This has left monitoring and enforcement of the burgeoning sports gambling industry largely up to the gambling concerns themselves. In order to build new habits in the betting public and newbies who could be persuaded to place sports bets, the Times found “many states allowed the gambling industry to give out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax-free bets.” Those sportswashed promotions resulted in “large shortfalls in expected tax revenues.”

In addition, more than a few state universities have compromised their education missions—which they already do in promoting their major sports teams—by entering into agreements to “partner” with “gambling sites” in exchange for “millions of dollars in payments.” There is a difference, though, between a public university profiting from its own football and basketball teams and profiting directly from sports gambling. Undoubtedly, that ethical comprise has taken a great deal of sportswashing to explain away.

Without federal intervention, which is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, there is very little in the way of regulation or enforcement against the civil and criminal excesses of the sports gambling industry and their powerful allies. With so much money flying around, the temptation to fix games and betting outcomes keeps increasing, while monitoring and enforcement mechanisms are practically nonexistent. Human nature suggests that any criminality that does occur will be largely ignored within the gambling industry and among the professional leagues and other sports organizations that benefit. None of these entities will want to have to admit to being associated with any gambling scandal.

In this out-of-control environment, the social harms gambling causes, including addictions, will continue to rise, no matter how many gambling addiction hot lines and public relations campaigns are funded. Unfortunately, with so little monitoring and enforcement, most of the damage from sports gambling is likely to escape close public scrutiny.  

Conclusion
​
Sports gambling-related problems and the personal and social harms they cause will continue to be sportswashed. Those harms will join brain damage to athletes as just another sports-related cost of doing business, which will be managed by public relations professionals and lawyers. While they are being entertained, most Americans will look away from the harm or embrace explanations why such damage is not nearly as bad as it seems. Monitoring and enforcement of spectator sports and sports gambling should be a priority of local, state, and federal government, but an overwhelming majority of those jurisdictions have decided to punt on first down instead.]]>Sat, 08 Oct 2022 17:19:28 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-47                                          The NFL WAY OF SPORTSWASHING CONTROVERSY
               The Rooney Rule, Concussion Protocols, and The Lingering Daniel Snyder Stench
                                                                    By John Weston Parry
 
One might think that the awful publicity the NFL has been getting lately, due to its highly ineffective Rooney Rule for minority hiring of coaches, flawed concussion protocols, and the lingering stench from the Daniel Snyder fiasco would have little in common. That would be a mistake. All three NFL sportswashed controversies are united by one similarity. They all have been handled by the NFL, in ways to protect the owners and the league, much more so than the well-being of its players and female employees.

The Rooney Rule was established in 2003, nearly twenty years ago, based on recommendations of the Pittsburgh Steelers’, often praised owner Dan Rooney, who chaired the league’s workplace diversity committee. That Rule has been modified several times since, all without much success. If anything, there has been a backward slide and the NFL now faces an embarrassing law suit filed by African-American, former head coach, Brian Flores, after he was fired by the Miami Dolphins. Yet, the Rooney rule has been so well packaged as a groundbreaking diversity and inclusion initiative that it has become a best practice in many other American businesses, and something the NFL actually brags about.

The NFL’s concussion protocols were introduced in 2011. They have been altered several times as well, and are about to be revised again, after a highly visible nationally televised screwup involving Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. Clearly, the initial guidelines and their revisions to better protect players’ brains have not been working out too well, at least not from the perspective of protecting players’ mental health now and down the road once they retire.

The Daniel Snyder fiasco continues on, endlessly. The Commissioner and the other owners have refused to do the right thing and force their comrade in arms to sell his franchise, after he has made countless egregious mistakes, including most seriously allowing the sexual abuse of his team’s female employees in which he apparently participated—at least to the extent Snyder felt compelled to pay off his victim and to try to use a settlement agreement to keep her from talking. All along, the NFL has mostly looked the other way, trying to create the impression that by placing Snyder’s wife in the titular role of running the team, the disgraced owner had effectively stepped aside, while the league had added to its dubious diversity accomplishments.   

The Rooney Rule

The first iteration of the Rooney Rule came after two distinguished Black head coaches, Tony Dungy and Dennis Green, were fired by their teams in 2002. That season Dungy had won more games than he lost, while Green had experienced his first losing season in ten years. Shortly thereafter, a study was released documenting how Black head coaches were more likely to be fired and less likely to be hired, even though they tended to have a higher winning percentage than white coaches. At that point, in the over eighty-year history of the NFL (1920-2002), only a handful of head coaches had been Black, seven to be exact.

Essentially, the initial Rooney Rule only required that league teams interview racial and ethnic-minority candidates for certain positions, head coach and certain non-owner senior positions having to do with football operations. There was no monitoring and accountability mechanisms included to ensure that these interviews were sincere efforts to find qualified African-American head coaches. In addition, this soft requirement did not even include non-head coaching positions, owners, or every football operations position, especially if owners were undertaking some of those football operations’ duties, officially or unofficially, themselves. Nor did the rule apply if a white assistant coach had a clause in his contract specifying that he would get the head coaching position if it became vacant.

At first, the Rule seemed to be progressing in the right direction, based on the numbers alone. To begin the 2006 season reportedly over 20% of the head coaches were Black. While this did not come close to reflecting the percentage of Black players in the league, it was relatively close to the percentage of racial plus ethnic minorities across the U.S. However, the NFL did not build upon that momentum. Instead, the percentages began to decline. By 2018, there were only three minority head coaches and only two were African Americans. This was the same number and percentage as when the Rooney Rule took effect in 2003. There also were only three minority head coaches in 2020.

At the end of the 2021 season in February 2022, Brian Flores filed a class action racial discrimination law suit against the NFL based on its teams depriving Black coaches of equal job opportunities, salaries, and benefits as compared to white coaches. He had been fired by the Dolphins in January and no other team had hired him to be a head coach again after what he described as “sham” interviews he was given. Flores attributed his situation to an NFL hiring process in which “Black Coaches are far less likely than white coaches to receive second chances.”

That sham process was illustrated by the revelation that three days before the New York Giants were going through the motions of interviewing Flores for their head coach vacancy, New England Patriots legendary head coach Bill Belichick had mistakenly sent Flores a text message congratulating him on getting the Giants position, thinking that he had communicated with Brian Daboll, the white former assistant Patriots Coach who apparently got the position based in part of Belchick’s recommendation. The Giants responded with a non-denial, denial that they had always been keen on Daboll and they felt he was the most qualified candidate.

As a result of the lawsuit, the NFL tried to minimize the damage by, in its words, “strengthen[ing]” the Rooney Rule. This appeared to be mostly window dressing. The two most significant improvements were incremental, while the other two were even less than that.

First, teams going forward, must “interview at least one diverse candidate” from either: a list prepared by NFL’s Career Development Advisory Panel, composed of “former coaches, executives, and players,” most of whom were white, including one of whom, John Madden, was in the process of dying; or “a diverse candidate not currently employed by the club.” Second, teams have to “maintain complete records and furnish to the league upon Commissioner’s request.” How this requirement is to be monitored and enforced has been left to the Commissioner’s discretion, and he, of course, is an employee of the owners.                     

Beginning the 2022 season, the NFL had, by its self-serving revised definition, six “diverse” head coaches, three who are African-Americans, one who is multiracial whatever that means, one who is Hispanic, and one who qualifies because his family is from Lebanon and he is Muslim. Bottom line, though, the three Black head coaches are the same number that there were when the Rooney Rule was first instituted.

As the league maintains in its sportwashed communications bulletin, “[t]hese policy enhancements are part of the League’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion,” which apparently is very little. As the Washington Post opined in an editorial following its “investigation” of the league in October 2022, the NFL’s record with regard to its hiring and other employment practices regarding “Black Coaches” remains “disgraceful.”

The Concussion Protocols

The medical and scientific evidence continues to mount that the risks of playing tackle football are even greater than most Americans ever imagined. Yet, as with the dangers of tobacco use, substantial cognitive dissonance persists, much of it perpetuated by sportswashed propaganda from the NFL and its allies, including the sports media. Better helmets and rule modifications have helped make the sport incrementally safer, but fundamentally tackle football is a dangerous sport, especially in terms of causing long-term mental impairments to a substantial percentage of players.

The NFL, for a long time now, has funded misleading public relations campaigns regarding the dangers of football that take sportswashing to new levels of sophistication. Despite the criticisms of the league and its medical experts for their continuing denials and deceptions, in April 2018 the NFL named a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, who had publicly expressed doubts about studies that link CTE to football, to be the chair of its head, neck, and spine committee.
 
More worrisome, Stanford University researchers confirmed what many neuro-scientists suspected for a long time: repeated sub-concussive impacts that occur dozens of times in a game or during practice sessions, can, over a football player’s lifetime, be much more devastating than multiple concussions. These mini-concussions are the brain traumas that were once cavalierly dismissed, or accepted as badges of honor, by calling them “dings” or having one’s “bell rung.” Typically, the harm from these sub-concussive impacts goes unnoticed, until it is too late to undo the damage to the player’s brain.
 
At all levels of football, the athletes continue to get bigger, stronger, and faster, which means each concussive collision generates more force and impact on the brains of the players being hit, and those doing the hitting. The frequent scientific comparison, even for kids, is that each of these collisions, which may occur dozens of times in a game or in practice sessions, can be like driving a car into a cement wall at 30 miles an hour. Unfortunately, that collision force keeps increasing as the athletes become more physically imposing.
 
Given this shameful history that directly involved the NFL’s chief publicist at the time, Roger Goodell, which appears to have played a big role in his becoming the Commissioner after Paul Tagliabue was cast aside. This does not inspire much confidence in the objectivity or sincerity of the league when it comes to matters involving the brain health of its players. Even the league’s much ballyhooed concussion protocols, which have been revised repeatedly already, continue to malfunction when put into practice.

So much discretion continues to be placed on the teams, the coaches, the doctors whose allegiances are often conflicted, and the players themselves, who do not want to be viewed as soft or concussion-prone. Even when the television cameras are rolling, there are screw ups and questionable decisions being made with respect to the brain health of the players. What happens in practices is anyone’s best guess, but it probably is not to the players’ benefit health-wise.

What is reasonably clear, however, is that these NFL concussion protocols are not being implemented as independent, medically-based decisions. There are too many subjective factors that come into play. Moreover, even if these concussion protocols were judiciously implemented to protect players’ health, they have little effect on the more serious problem for NFL athletes, which is repeated subconcussive impacts, which do not immediately produce concussion-like symptoms, but too often lead to life-long cognitive malfunctions and behavioral issues.

In a perfect storm of brain damage recklessness, the flaws in the NFL’s concussion protocols were on full display in two nationally televised football games in late September 2022. Normally, much of what happens during practices, and even in games to less scrutinized players, tends to fly under the radar. In this case, the player was Tua Tagovailoa, a starting quarterback, who up to that point was having a breakout season for the resurgent Miami Dolphins.
 
In the first contest of note, which was on a Sunday afternoon, his team was playing a division rival the Buffalo Bills. In the second quarter, Tagovailoa could be clearly seen staggering to even walk off the field, after he had been slammed to the ground, helmet first by a Bills player. As Jerry Brewer reported in The Washington Post, Tagovailoa’s “gross motor instability” appeared to be a clear sign of potential brain trauma. The quarterback left the field under concussion protocols to be examined by a so-called “neurotrauma consultant” hired by the league, but not the team itself.” Inexplicably, the quarterback “was cleared to return… and finished the game.”   
 
Four days later, Tagovailoa was quarterbacking on Thursday night football in Cincinnati, after being cleared to play for what he and his team were now calling a “hyperextended” back, not a concussion or brain trauma that would have required him to be placed on the injured list. During that contest, Tagovailoa was tackled hard and once again his helmet struck the ground violently. This time, as the Post explained, he could not get up on his own power. He lay motionless, supine on his back, with “his arms and fingers splayed in front of his face.” Neuro-specialists identify such a display as an involuntary response, triggered by some sort of serious brain trauma. Tagovailoa should never have been allowed on the field in the first place.
 
The NFL and the Dolphins went into a full damage control mode. The league fired the medical specialist, who had let the quarterback return to action in the Buffalo game, implicitly creating the impression that what happened was entirely his fault. On the other hand, all the team-generated press releases and comments by his head coach were suspiciously upbeat, while Tagovailoa himself reportedly said all the right things about how he was okay and improving, but would not be playing in the next game.
 
A few days later, officials from the NFL and NFL Players Association indicated that they were going to speak with the quarterback to get his statement about what had happened, as part of an internal investigation, the sportswashed findings of which, were to be announced sometime in the future. Those officials also indicated that it was “likely” they would be making some changes to the protocols sometime in the future as well, but the league and the union have not yet agreed what those changes should be.   
 
Whether or not some cosmetic changes are announced, any objective assessment of the severity of Tagovailoa’s successive brain traumas in a short period of time, and who was responsible, should not be based on information doled out by the Dolphins, the league, and even the union. Ultimately, the severity should be judged based on how many games the quarterback actually misses as a result, how he performs once he returns to action, and whether he develops CTE-like symptoms in the near or more distant future. Assessed responsibility should be based on an outside investigation, which is unlikely to ever happen, unless one day Tagovailoa decides to sue the league for his brain injuries.  
 
The Daniel Snyder Debacle

The most recent part of the Daniel Snyder saga emerged after 15 former female employees and two women sports reporters in a July 2020 Washington Post expose alleged that, collectively, they had been “sexually harassed and subjected to verbal abuse in incidents from 2006 to 2019.” They also were “told to wear revealing clothes and flirt with clients to close deals.” These allegations were in addition to a prior cheerleader scandal in which the team’s marketing department “forced” these “women … to act as escorts for corporate sponsors and luxury-suite owners and [were] made to pose topless as men watched.”

Snyder claimed he was not directly involved with any of this, but as the Post’s Will Hobson and Liz Clarke documented at the time, he was a “micromanager” who belittled his executive staff if they do not meet his expectations. Snyder’s “male executives repeatedly commented about [the former female employees’] looks…, sent inappropriate texts and pressed [those women] for dates.” Three men in Snyder’s “inner circle” resigned. This included Larry Michael the team’s radio broadcast voice and senior vice president in charge of “content,” and Alex Santos, the “director of pro personnel.”

The NFL, which, for years has been accused of marginalizing sexual misconduct and domestic violence by its players, issued a press release acknowledging that these allegations were “serious, disturbing and contrary to the NFL’s values.” According to league insiders, though, the NFL probably was going to briefly “consider disciplinary measures” against the team’s owner, but ultimately Snyder would be allowed to keep his team, which is what has happened so far.

As has become typical in these NFL matters, Snyder also was allowed to hire the outside law firm, which was conducting the league’s investigation. That investigation was difficult to conduct because the former female employees making the accusations were compelled by Snyder to sign nondisclosure agreements when the franchise hired them.

An incredulous Washington Post asked why “would the National Football League … trust team owner Daniel Snyder to fix anything?” Snyder “tolerated an abusive work culture and tried to keep that reality from being known.” He countenanced “a predatory office environment” which “completely… failed” to protect his female employees.

Like so many leagues and sports enterprises caught in misogynistic scandals, Snyder responded by hiring the first woman in his organization to fill a high-profile executive position. Julia Donaldson became the new broadcast voice of the team and vice-president of media. Donaldson was “believed to be the first woman to be a full-time member of an NFL team’s radio booth.”

A few months later, though, as 2020 was coming to a close, the scandal was resurrected and greatly expanded when a team of Washington Post reporters documented that in 2009, the franchise had paid “a former female employee $1.6 million as part of a confidential settlement” after she had “accused Daniel Snyder of sexual misconduct.” Although “in the agreement, neither Snyder nor the team acknowledged any wrongdoing,” Post columnist Barry Svrluga succinctly summarized the ugliness of the new information:

      Snyder] is being revealed not just as the head creep who oversaw and allowed a corporate                    culture that degraded and devalued women, but an active participant who paid off an accuser            to make his problems go away.

Since then, despite Congressional investigations and continued media revelations about Snyder’s complicity and direct involvement in the sexual harassment and abuse of Washington Football Team’s female employees, the NFL has done almost nothing, in stark contrast to the NBA, which has banished owners from the league for similar or lesser misogynistic transgressions.

Instead of assuming responsibility for the multitude of offenses that his franchise has committed against its female employees, including those Snyder apparently perpetrated himself, the owner, as Barry Svrluga explained, has tried to blame everyone in sight except himself. In Snyder’s sportswashed fantasy, “whatever happened… in the past is not at all his fault” However, all that “is happening now ÷ as the organization tries to reinvent itself ÷ is completely his doing.” This Snyder claims to be true, “even though it is happening as the NFL has said he can’t be involved in the franchise’s day-to-day operations….”

​It is difficult to imagine a greater example of duplicity in a man, or in a league that continues to protect him. Snyder—as does the NFL itself—in Svrluga’s words, “wants credit for anything good and absolution for anything bad.” This has become the NFL’s typical sportswashed response when any controversy arises that might embarrass the league or its owners.    

]]>Sat, 06 Aug 2022 17:37:21 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-46POLITICS AND SPORTS In 2022: THE NCAA and ABORTION, LIV GOLF, and BILL RUSSELL’S CIVIL RIGHTS LEGACY
By John Weston Parry, J.D. 
 
The sportswashed myth that our favorite spectator sports should be removed and separated from politics, increasingly, has been taking a beating. Not very long ago, it was Black Lives Matter and the #Me Too Movement that provided a barrage of criticism, almost on a daily basis, demanding sports enterprises change along with society. Those particular cries have been tempered somewhat at the moment, but three other important developments have pushed American sports back into the national political spotlight.
 
The first involves the NCAA, which for a change seems to be on the progressive side of an issue when it comes to abortion, at least for now. The second is the PGA Tour opposing, for its own selfish reasons, the sportswashed Saudi Arabian-sponsored LIV golf tour. And last, but certainly not least, the recent death of the great Bill Russell, whose life and basketball career elevated the Celtics and NBA, while shining a light on racial injustices in the league, around Boston, and throughout the United States.
 
The NCAA and Abortions for Female Athletes
 
For a number of years now, the NCAA has not only supported the right of female college athletes to seek an abortion, but has tried to provide a system to help pregnant athletes better decide what to do. While the NCAA has not mandated universities and colleges to use any particular approach, its officials established a “pregnancy tool kit” as a guide. As Molly Hensley-Clark describes in her excellent article for The Washington Post, NCAA recommends that its member-schools “assemble a `decision-making team’ of coaches, team doctors, athletic officials, family members, faith leaders and counselors” to help the pregnant athlete decide what to do.
 
In the spectator sports world—as it is in many businesses—there are financial and competitive  incentives to encourage employees to terminate their pregnancies and facilitate their ability to do so. Thus, it is not that  surprising the male-dominated, often misogynist, NCAA ended up, for the moment, on the progressive side of this abortion issue, when, in the past it has been on the more conservative, and even reactionary, side of other political issues.
 
Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and 20 states already have abortion bans on the books, many of which are draconian intrusions into pregnant peoples’ right to make their own decisions, the NCAA appears to be faced with a political dilemma. Will it hold fast to the recommendations it has embraced in its “pregnancy tool kit” or will it revise that guidance to placate pro-life governmental forces? In addition, the NCAA will be called on to decide: whether to sponsor major events in jurisdictions that have laws in place that will make it impossible, or next to impossible, for NCAA female athletes to choose to terminate their pregnancies?
 
These political questions surrounding abortion become especially poignant for female athletes. First, for girls and women who are good enough to participate in college sports, their ability to perform athletically is essential for them to receive college scholarships and admission preferences. This is particularly important for those female athletes who lack the financial resources to afford college on their own.
 
Second, as the Post article concludes “the power centers of elite women’s college sports are disproportionately in states where abortion access is likely to be restricted or banned altogether.” Moreover, many of the key college sporting events for female athletes “are held in states with some of the strictest abortion laws.”   
 
What the NCAA will do is likely to be determined by the interests of the super conference members because they largely control the decisions that the NCAA makes. Thus, while it is clearly in the interest, of college sports for women, to at least toe the line and seriously consider prohibiting NCAA-sponsored events in those states with the more draconian abortion bans, that is unlikely. The huge financial imbalance that favors male NCAA sports has always been the most significant factor in determining the NCAA’s positions on key moral issues. If the past is any guide, most people of a child-bearing age, including female athletes, may be sorely disappointed in the NCAA’s ultimate abortion policy decisions.
 
LIV Professional Golf Tour and the PGA Tour
 
Saudi Arabia is one of the most reprehensible nations in the world, reportedly facilitating terrorism, murders and torture of its dissidents, and the repression of its entire female population. Except for its access to so much oil, the U.S. might well categorize it, along with North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, as a terrorist state. Instead, many American businesses, including the  brand new LIV professional golf tour and the golfers on that tour, gladly accept the Saudi sovereign’s blood money and sponsorship.
 
The collection of about 50 professional golfers, who now make up the LIV tour, is composed of a few big name golfers, whose best golf days are behind them, like Phil Mickelson and Ian Poulter, or are struggling, like Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, along with lower ranked PGA Tour golfers, like Taylor Gooch or Henrik Stenson, who are trying to make a bigger name for themselves. Only Dustin Johnson is in the top 20 of the World Golf Rankings and he has dropped from #1 to #18 in recent months, and may continue to drop.
 
LIV Tour members are guaranteed money through often huge signing bonuses, especially  the big name players. Brooks Koepka, a four time major golf winner, received a reported $100 million. ESPN stated that “[m]any [other] players… received guaranteed signing bonuses of between $100 and $200 million.”  According to Greg Norman, who is a driving force behind the LIV Tour, Tiger Woods was offered $700-800 million to play. Woods declined, noting any players who accepted this Saudi money were “turn[ing] their back” on the PGA Tour, which had made them golfing stars.    
 
The PGA and LIV tours are now battling each other to be the primary, or in the case of the PGA the sole, organization representing touring professional golfers in the United States, while the European PGA Tour is battling the LIV Tour for primacy in Europe. These two PGA affiliated tours have suspended their members who have signed to play on the LIV Tour.  
 
For many Americans, the overriding issue is opposing the repressive Saudi regime that was responsible for the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi and, reportedly, the 9-11 attacks on United States. For the PGA Tour, though, it is about protecting its professional golf monopoly.
  
All of this political tension in the American professional golf world came to a head at the end of July when the LIV Tour held its 3rd, and most publicized, tournament at former President Donald Trump’s course in Bedminster, New Jersey. As Todd Kelly of Golfweek opined “[b]y embracing Trump, LIV Golf brands itself as the MAGA Tour. The winner of that Bedminster event, Henrik Stenson, received $4 million, while the golfer who came in last still took home $120,000. The $25 million total purse was considerably larger that what is awarded at major PGA tournaments and the money is divisible among far few golfers.
 
While Trump has sided with the LIV Tour and Saudi Arabia, so far most golf fans seem to have sided with the PGA, if attendance is any measure. According to The New York Times, a typical PGA Tour event attracts 20,000 people each day—and many more for the majors and the Tour Championship. This well-publicized LIV tournament drew  “no more than several thousand” on Sunday and far fewer than that the other two days. A ticket to the event “could be bought for $2 on the secondary ticket market..”
 
A month ago, stories had swirled in the media that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating the PGA Tour for alleged anticompetitive practices, impeding those members, who have joined the LIV Tour. A couple of days after the Bedminster golf tournament concluded, 11 LIV golfers, including Phil Michaelson and Bryson DeChambeau, filed an antitrust action against the PGA Tour.
 
According to that lawsuit, the PGA Tour “has employed its dominance to craft an arsenal of anticompetitive restraints to protect its long-standing monopoly… The Tour has [engaged] in an intentional and relentless effort to crush nascent competition before it threatens the Tour’s monopoly.” In addition several LIV Tour golfers who have qualified for the FedEX Cup filed for a temporary injunction, so they can play in that lucrative competition. claiming irreparable financial harm.
 
According to ESPN, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan responded in a letter to the PGA Tour players that the Tour:
 
will continue to defend the members who abide by the regulations written by and for the players… Fundamentally, these suspended players-- who are now Saudi Golf League employees -- have walked away from the Tour and now want back in…. It’s an attempt use the TOUR platform to promote themselves and to freeride on your benefits and efforts.”
 
As a legal matter, because the LIV Tour players have received so much money, it is unlikely that a temporary restraining order will be granted. However, the antitrust case probably will go forward to trial or settlement, especially if the Justice Department’s investigation finds that the PGA acted illegally to restrain competition.
 
Bill Russell’s Civil Rights Legacy
 
More so than any other African American  athlete, including the heroic Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell was a civil rights icon who other, mostly Black, athletes learned to follow. Robinson may have been first and eventually more celebrated by and accessible to the white establishment, but Russell would become more admired, especially by Black athletes and African American communities. MLB was a white man’s sport. The NBA, because of Russell and Black superstars to follow, became the sport of Black America. Jackie Robinson would become a Richard Nixon Republican, while Russell became a civil rights luminary.
 
More importantly, perhaps, in practical terms, both in politics and sports, Americans love a winner. Robinson was a great major league baseball player for a relatively short period of time from 1947-1954. However, he was not as great as several of his Black contemporaries, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and his teammate Roy Campanella; nor a number of white players, like Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle.
 
Russell, by comparison, became the winningest American player in any sports league, beginning with two national collegiate championships as the star player on the San Francisco Dons. He followed that success with a gold medal, staring on the U.S. national basketball team at the 1956 Olympics. Despite those amazing early accomplishments, the St.Louis Hawks traded Bill Russell, the #2 pick in the 1956 draft, to the Boston Celtics for two white players, Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan. Reportedly, the Hawks did not think their white fan base would accept a Black star as the face of the NBA’s southern-most franchise.
 
The first pick in that draft also was an African American, Si Green, a prolific scorer as a 6-2 shooting guard and forward at Duquesne University, but nowhere near the player Russell was. Green went to the Rochester Royals, who passed on Russell, after Celtics owner Walter Brown promised the Royals owner to he would send the Ice Capades, then a big deal, to Rochester.
 
The Celtics who had never won a championship before became champions in Russell’s first year in the league. Russell would lead the Celtics to 11 championships in 13 years, including two as a player-coach, after Red Auerbach became the Celtics general manager. During that 13 year-span, Russell was an all-star twelve times, every year, except his first, and the league’s MVP five times. Russell also became the first Black head coach of any major American sports franchise when he took over, at Auerbach’s urging, in 1966.  
 
Basketball, though, as important as it was to Russell, proved to be his platform to becoming a great man. Along with his unmatched intensity to win, Russell had a painful relationship with the city of Boston, during a period of time when racism and apartheid were still acceptable among a substantial portion of Bostonians and the American population, and not prohibited by any of our federal civil rights laws until 1964, late in his basketball career.
 
Even in the NBA, where many Black players thrived, there still were quotas on the number of Black players on most teams. The Celtics, which represented a racially  divisive Boston metropolitan area, was a partial exception. In large part that was because of Auerbach to begin with; then Russell’s athletic brilliance thereafter, even when matched up against the great Wilt Chamberlain, arguably the most physically imposing player of his generation, and one of the greatest scorers and rebounders, ever.  
 
Moreover, by the 1961-62 season, the two most important Celtic players, other than Russell, were also Black, guards Sam and K.C. Jones, who were not related. K.C. Jones was a defensive prodigy at his position, much like Russel was at center, except Russell was able to carry his team based on his defense alone. Sam Jones, on the other hand, was a deadly shooter, who made Johnny Most’s “stop and pop” broadcast description a thing of beauty. Lost in that shooters embrace was Russell’s long outlet passes, after prodigious rebounds, which made many of Jones’ open looks possible.
 
The New York Times obituary of Russell noted that in 1980, a few years after he had retired, “a poll of basketball writers”named him the greatest NBA player in history. Former Senator and basketball great Bill Bradley, who played against Russell for a number of seasons, called Russell “the smartest player ever to play the game and the epitome of a team leader.”
 
Russell was all about team and had little regard for the City of Boston or much of the rest of the NBA. To him, Boston was almost an extension of the rural Louisiana racism he and his parents experienced while he was growing up. And in St.Louis, playing against the team that had eagerly traded away his rights, which was often vying with the Celtics for championships, the fans in that city frequently hurled racist epithets at Russell.   
    
Russell’s time in Boston, especially in his early years, was marred by what appeared to be a number of racially motivated slights. Even though in his first year Russell led Boston to its first championship by being the best defensive player the league had ever seen, scoring nearly 15 points a game, while hauling in 22.5 rebounds, he was snubbed for an All Star spot and the rookie of the year. Tommy Heinsohn, who contributed 16 points and 10 rebounds a game, but was notoriously out of shape, so he could not play good defense, won that award, and was an All-Star to boot.
 
Until 1963, the Celtics were known as Cousy’s team, even though Russell was more important to the franchise’s success. Celtics fans and sportswriters embraced Cousy, much more so than they did Russell. Cousy acknowledged, years later, that he felt guilty for not having spoken up against the racism that Russell endured in Boston and around the league and for not establishing a closer relationship with his teammate.      
 
All of this angst apparently spurred Russell to appear emotionally distant by separating himself from the fans, the limelight, the city of Boston, and the accolades and awards he would receive. Instead, he focused on freeing himself from all the racism that surrounded him, while never forgetting the importance of being a social activist for civil rights. Throughout his adult life, he never flinched on that score.
 
During the 1961-62 season, after Russell already had led the Celtics to four championships in five years, the team was on the road to play a regular season game against the St. Louis Hawks in Lexington, Kentucky, in order to attract fans from the Kentucky Wildcats fan base. Two Black Celtics’ players, Sam Jones and Satch Sanders, went to eat in the hotel coffee shop where the team was staying, but were turned away because they were colored.
 
Russell led a boycott of that game by Black players on both teams, over Red Auerbach’s objection. The game went on anyway. Rookie Cleo Hill, a first round pick for the Hawks, who joined the boycott, was ostracized by his white teammates and was out of the league the next year. Celtics owner Walter Brown, however, reportedly told Auerbach the game should never have been played. Brown promised “never to subject my players to that embarrassment again.”
 
Russell explained to reporters: “We’ve got to show our disapproval of this kind o treatment or else the status quo will prevail. We have the same rights and privileges as anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly.” This civil rights act of defiance preceded Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’ gloved fist protest at the 1968 Olympics by more than six years. It can rightly be called the first major example of collective social activism by professional athletes in the United States, and Russell was its leader.
 
According to the Bay State  Banner, less than two years later in May 1963, Russell was demonstrating his commitment to civil rights once again, this  time in Boston. He led some 2,000 marchers from Roxbury to Boston Common where they met thousands of other protesters. “It was the largest civil rights demonstration in Boston history up until that time.” A month later, Russell joined “5,000 African American junior and senior high school students who staged the first ‘Boston School Stay Out’ to protest ‘de facto segregation’ in the Boston Public Schools.”
 
That August, Russell was front and center when Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Afterwards, because civil rights leader Medger Evers had been murdered earlier in the year, Russell traveled to Mississippi in the offseason to help Charles Evers, Medger’s brother, establish an integrated camp for youth basketball in Jackson. In 1966, when Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War on religious grounds, Russell was one of the most prominent and vocal Black athletes who rallied in support of the world champion boxer.
 
In 2011, President Barach Obama presented Russell with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a White House ceremony, recognizing Russell as an athlete “who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.” A few years later, in September 2017, after President Trump had called on NFL owners to release mostly Black players for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial inequalities, Russell used his Freedom medal as a prop in a Twitter photo, which showed him taking a knee as well.  
            
]]>Thu, 30 Jun 2022 17:38:35 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-45UPDATE: A REACTIONARY U.S. SUPREME COURT MAJORITY IMPOSE THEIR CHRISTIAN PATRIARCHAL VALUES ON PUBLIC SCHOOL SPORTS 
 
John Weston Parry, J.D.
 
Introduction

While a United States Supreme Court majority has made headlines, day after day, because of their decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, another smaller case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, was just decided, which also foists the Court’s reactionary patriarchal Christian values, encased in legal sophistry, on all Americans. The question in this dispute was whether a public school system in Oregon acted illegally by requiring an assistant high school football coach to refrain from conspicuously praying in the middle of a public high school football field after games and encouraging players, students, and the community to participate with him?
 
Even based on the doctrines that the Court has been embracing recently, this case appeared to be a clear cut example of where religion should not have been allowed to intrude into the public domain. As they did in Roe v. Wade, however, a 6-3 Supreme Court majority insisted that, when patriarchal Christian values are at issue, they should largely dictate Constitutional outcomes, even when that means overturning long established Court precedents.
 
The white patriarchy who, crafted the Constitution, which, in most respects, was a brilliant document as written in 1776 and 1777, were, or professed to be, devout Christians. The main reason why reactionary judges today insist upon interpreting the Constitution strictly as it was written nearly 250 years ago (originalism) is to allow them to consistently uphold Christian patriarchal values. That way of thinking is little different than continuing to insist that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe, no matter what new knowledge has taught us, because those false beliefs remain sacred Christian dogmas established centuries ago, and thus must not be tampered with.
 
Christianity has been widely cemented into American culture in many different traditions, holidays, and the law. There is little need or justification for adding to that Christian patriarchal bias. In 1954, during the McCarthy era witch hunts to identify un-American activities and disloyal Americans, “a nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Today, public school children in 47 states still are required to recite this Christian-inspired Pledge, unless they are willing to call attention to themselves by asking, and qualifying, for a special exemption that will label them as being different, and for many, un-American.
 
Christian religious indoctrination in the public sphere may be extremely popular among a significant minority of Americans, but it also is inherently discriminatory with harmful consequences to those people who are: religious but not not Christian; not Christian enough; and secular. With football and other team sports, religious indoctrination and its resulting damage can be—and has been—particularly acute when Christianity becomes an implicit, or even explicit, requirement to be considered a loyal team member. Here, the football players’ public high school coach led communal prayer sessions after football games and encouraged them to participate.
 
The Majority’s Decision
 
Under the Constitution, as it has been interpreted for decades, freedom of religion has ha two essential components: (1) the right to practice freely according to one’s religious beliefs; and (2) the right not to be compelled or coerced into believing or practicing any particular religious beliefs. While these complementary, but sometimes conflicting, constitutional religious freedoms pertain to actions associated with governmental entities, including public schools, their underlying rationales have provided important moral principles for Americans generally, as well as for our federal and state laws prohibiting religiously-based discrimination more specifically.
 
In Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, both rights were at issue and should have been balanced against each other. Nevertheless, Justice Gorsuch, writing for the Court, pretended that only one of those rights was present, despite overwhelming evidence that both were being litigated. That legal fiction allowed the Court to conclude Coach Kennedy had “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” The majority then decided, falsely as the evidence indicated, there was no issue to be decided whether players and students were being encouraged to participate in this traditional Christian religious, football ceremony.         
 
In full MAGA mode—or perhaps it should be called MACA (Make America Christian Again)—Justice Gorsuch and his reactionary cronies saw no problem in essentially lying in order to get the Christian result they wanted. This was done under a specious rationale that the Court was upholding the “Constitution and the best of our traditions, [which] counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views.” The majority then found  “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse republic －whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head.”
 
Justice Sotomayor’s Dissent
 
Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the Court’s majority, by ignoring the evidence that had been presented to the Ninth Circuit, embraced a blatant deception and applied faulty reasoning in deciding this case. As had been widely reported, Coach Kennedy was not, as the majority pretended, engaged in solitary or silent prayer for a brief moment after each game.
 
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan, attached photographs that proved Coach Kennedy was leading prayer sessions at mid-field after games in which team members and other students had participated. Previously, the coach had even led prayer sessions in the locker room, but abandoned that practice when school authorities objected. The school district tried to accommodate the coach by telling him he could pray by himself after games.
 
Kennedy rejected that compromise, however, because he wanted a public forum in which to enlist players, other students, and the community to join in his Christian prayer sessions. He told reporters that joining him in prayer would make those students better citizens.
 
The majority’s legal fiction was a sneaky and unethical way to allow it to marginalize Supreme Court precedents, which for decades had ruled that public schools may not actively encourage students to participate in religious activities. Sotomayor’s dissent castigated the majority for ignoring the religious rights of the students in order to take the country “further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion, with all our rights hanging in the balance.”
 
Sotomayor observed, as the evidence had established, Coach “Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student-athletes in prayer with players and others.” These religious entreaties were coercive in nature because “[s]students look up to their teachers and coaches as role models and seek their approval. Students also depend on this approval for tangible benefits. Players recognize that gaining the coach’s approval may pay dividends small and large, from extra playing time to a stronger letter of recommendation to additional support in college athletic recruiting.”
 
As Justice John Paul Stevens decided for the majority in the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman, the “delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship.” Justice Gorsuch simply dismissed that concern by concluding the Lemon precedent had long ago been discarded. Furthermore, in his judgment, these Oregon “[s]tudents were not required or expected to participate.”
 
Justice Sotomayor responded that while Lemon had been criticized by certain justices over the years, it had never been specifically overruled. Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion was now eviscerating that precedent “entirely and in all contexts”—much like it did to Roe v. Wade.
 
Conclusion
 
There were a number of different ways the Supreme Court could have decided this case. The majority chose the path which would most expand Christian patriarchal values. First, the Justices could—and should—have accepted the Ninth Circuit’s factual record and let the appellate court’s ruling in favor of the Bremerton, Oregon School District stand. Based on past First Amendment freedom of religion precedents, that would have been the correct legal outcome.
 
Second, if the majority really believed the evidence was in dispute, which clearly it was not, they could have remanded the matter for a new determination based on additional fact-finding. Instead, they created a legal fiction, which ignored the evidence in the court record; then pretended all Coach Kennedy did was to pray “quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”
 
Third, even if the majority felt obliged to embrace that legal fiction, the Court could have adopted the more measured approach Chief Justice Roberts had proposed in oral arguments. In that scenario, the coach simply was “going out to midfield, kneeling, taking a knee, and that’s it….” This rationale would not have required the Court to overrule Lemon.  
 
Mirroring its decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, the majority settled on the approach that would push their Christian patriarchy forward as far as possible. Justice Gorsuch, along with five other members of the Court, not only upheld Coach Kennedy’s right to promote his Christian beliefs on a public high school football field after the game was over, they gutted decades of past precedents that had prohibited school authorities from pressuring students to engage in religious-based rituals and activities. What they did was wrong, both legally and morally.
]]>Mon, 16 May 2022 17:24:13 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-44              A REACTIONARY U.S. SUPREME COURT TAKES AIM At PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
 
                                                    John Weston Parry, J.D.
 
Introduction
           
While a devout Christian majority on the United States Supreme Court has made headlines, day after day, because of their impending decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, there is another smaller case to be decided, which also may foist the Court’s reactionary Christian values, encased in legal sophistry, on all Americans. The question in that dispute is whether a public school system in Oregon acted illegally by insisting that an assistant high school football coach refrain from conspicuously praying in the middle of a public high school football field after games, hoping players, students, and the community would participate with him?
 
Even based on the traditional Christian doctrines that the Court has been embracing recently, this should be a clear cut example of where religion should not be allowed to intrude into the public domain. As with Roe v. Wade, however, the Court majority apparently views its role as ensuring that, when they are at issue, traditional Christian values largely dictate Constitutional outcomes.
 
An overwhelming majority of the white men who wrote the Constitution in 1776 and 1777 were, or professed to be, devout Christians. The main reason why reactionary judges insist upon interpreting the Constitution strictly as it was written nearly 250 years ago (originalism) is to consistently uphold these too often outdated Christian values. That legal way of thinking is little different than continuing to insist that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe, no matter what new knowledge has taught us, because those mistaken beliefs remain sacred Christian dogma established centuries ago, and thus should not be tampered with.
 
Christianity already has been widely cemented into American culture in many different traditions, holidays, and the law. There is little need or justification for adding to that bias. In 1954, during the McCarthy era witch hunts to identify unAmerican activities and disloyal Americans, “a nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Today, public school children in 47 states still are required to recite the Christian-inspired Pledge, unless they are willing to call attention to themselves by asking, and qualifying, for a special exemption that will label them as being different, and for too many un-American.
 
Christian religious indoctrination in the public sphere may be extremely popular among a significant minority of Americans, but it also is inherently discriminatory with harmful consequences to those people who are not Christian or Christian enough. In football and other team sports, that religious indoctrination and resulting damage can be particularly acute when Christianity becomes an implicit, or even explicit, requirement to be considered a loyal team member.
 
Sports and Religion
 
Under the Constitution, as it has been interpreted, freedom of religion has two essential rights: (1) to practice freely according to one’s religious beliefs; and (2) not to be compelled or coerced to believe in or practice religion in any particular way. While these complementary, but sometimes conflicting, religious freedoms pertain to actions associated with governments, their underlying rationales have provided important moral principles for Americans more generally, and in our laws prohibiting religious-based discrimination, more specifically.
 
With regard to American spectator sports in modern times, such concerns have had less to do with athletes’ right to practice their religion freely—which was a serious problem that Muhammad Ali addressed so heroically—and more with the right to be free of religious pressures and influences, especially attempts at indoctrination by coaches and teammates.
 
Most of the problems in attaining religious freedom for athletes in this country have their roots in the close associations between various sports and Christian religions. Too often, certain Christian denominations, or individuals from those denominations, proselytize their narrow religious values as being what is necessary to qualify as being a good person and a good teammate. The path to enlightenment requires conversion, or at least capitulation.
 
Hate the sin, not the sinner is the most benign manifestation of that fundamental Christian doctrine. Live and let live, not so much. One could only imagine the public outcry if a coach strongly encouraged every athlete on a team to believe in Islamic values and what is written in the Koran (Quaran).
 
In sports, when teams embrace Christianity, the athletes who are not Christians or not Christian enough, can, and often are, excluded and marginalized. As Barrack Obama found out, even someone as powerful as the President of the United States can be, and was, diminished in this way by false rumors and lies that he was not a Christian. For decades, and even centuries now, there has been a close association between American sports and Christian religion. Christian religious leaders have viewed organized team sports as a means to serve Christianity and promote Christian values.
 
This has been especially true of football where many team huddles before and after games feature Christian prayers, while openly Christian players like Tim Tebow thank their Christian God after each touchdown or special play. Liberty University began its quest to become a major football power, similar to Notre Dame, by anointing its athletes and teams with the moniker “Champions for Christ.” Baylor University tried to excuse sexual assaults by its football players against female students because, according to their Christian precepts, the victims were acting in “unchaste” ways when they were raped.
 
Much of this Christian morality is a sham to empower and protect Christian men. The noted former New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte observed, “so many of the God Squadders have turned out to be hypocrites, moaning in the chapel before the game, moaning in the lap-dance club afterwards.” The former All-Pro running back for the Houston Texans, Adrian Foster, complained of the enormous pressure on him playing football to appear to be Christian. Being openly secular is more unusual in professional sports than coming out as gay. According to ESPN The Magazine, Foster became “the first active professional athlete… [to do so].”
 
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District    
 
Despite the immense pressures that can exist for young athletes to embrace, or pretend to embrace, Christ as their God, it is those Christian proselytizers who are perceived as the victims when they are told to desist in the public domain. Joseph Kennedy, the former high school assistant football, coach, who refused to stop leading on-the-field prayers after public high school football games, appears to have garnered great sympathy on the Supreme Court. As the Washington Post headline described after oral arguments in that case, “Court majority sympathizes with coach who led prayers.”
 
Reportedly, the school district tried to accommodate the coach by telling him he could pray by himself after games. Kennedy objected, however, because he wanted a public forum in which to enlist players, other students, and the community to join in his Christian prayer sessions. He told reporters that praying would make those students better citizens.
 
As Justice Elena Kagan opined, in sharp contrast to the Court’s reactionary majority, the very act of a coach trying to enlist high school students to join him in prayer, is “coercive…, regardless if they know that it’s him and not the school district… He’s the one who controls playing time…” The school district’s attorney distinguished Kennedy’s public action from a coach who makes the sign of the cross during a game, which is an inherently private gesture.   
 
There are at least four ways this case could be decided. The unlikeliest outcome, given the Court’s Christian bias, is for the justices to uphold the school district’s decision. In doing so, the Court could emphasize that a satisfactory religious accommodation was attempted in allowing Kennedy to pray on school grounds by himself, but that the coach rejected that offer.
 
The Court could decide to remand the matter for a new determination based on further fact-finding, regarding the school district’s proffered accommodation and Kennedy’s alleged refusal to comply. That would take the justices off the hot seat, at least for the moment, with regard to a very controversial religious matter.
 
If the Court majority is intent on continuing to expand Christian values in the public domain, however, which appears to be likely, there are two paths for it to take. First, following Chief Justice Roberts lead, the Court could redefine the issue as “simply the coach going out to midfield, kneeling, taking a knee, and that’s it….” In such a scenario, the majority would reverse the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit based on a purported factual error, finding that the school system had not offered Kennedy a proper accommodation. Thus, the Court would only be specifically upholding Tim Tebow like Christian gestures, not prayer sessions in the middle of a public high school football field. 
 
If the majority heads in the same direction as it appears to be going in overturning Roe v Wade, Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh could collectively decide to rule for Kennedy’s right to proselytize his Christian beliefs on a public high school football field after the game is over. They could emphasize that participation by members of Kennedy’s team, students, and the community would be strictly voluntary. Thus, those private actions technically might not violate the boundaries between church and state.
 
My best guess is that alternative four will not happen for two reasons. First, in the context of the Court overturning Roe v Wade, such a decision in the public-school- prayer case would contribute a great deal of ammunition to the rhetoric that Alito and his Federalist Society cronies are intent on ignoring all past precedents, which conflict with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
 
Second, Justice Kavanaugh, while firmly in the Court’s anti-abortion camp, seems more likely than his more reactionary cohorts to follow precedent on other matters. He is an originalist in name only. Kavanaugh and the Chief Justice have diverged from originalist interpretations numerous times and, in fact, have been called out for not toeing the Federalist Society party line.
 
Thus, I suspect that either the matter will be remanded for further factual findings, or the Court will change the facts to suit its purposes. I would be pleasantly surprised, however, if the Justices let the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in favor of the Bremerton, Oregon School District stand. Based on past First Amendment freedom of religion precedents, that would be the correct legal outcome.
]]>Thu, 10 Mar 2022 18:40:46 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-43                   RUSSIAN AND BELARUSIAN ATHLETES DESERVE The BENEFIT Of The DOUBT,                                                                     RUSSIA, CHINA, The IOC, AND FIFA DO NOT 
                                                                             John Weston Parry
 
Introduction

Many—probably most—athletes who are Russian or from Belarus, neither actively support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, nor participate in Russia’s state sponsored doping program, at least not willingly. Knowing which ones do and don’t can be extremely difficult to discern, accurately. Being athletes from Russia or Belarus should not lead to presumptions of wrongdoing. They should not automatically become targets of widespread social media condemnation, nor fan abuse.

The benefit of the doubt should go to the individual Russian or Belarusian athletes, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. Damaging or ruining someone’s career is not something that should be taken lightly. A gut feeling, hunch, or belief, based on an athlete’s nationality and that country’s misdeeds, should not suffice. Would it be fair for American athletes to be held responsible for the awful things Donald Trump did while he was President? What athletes have actually said or done is how they should be evaluated, individually.

At the same time, no sports team or organization representing Russia or Belarus should be able to participate in sports, internationally. That prohibition should continue at least until the Russian war in Ukraine is halted and a peace treaty is signed by all the major stakeholders: Russia, Ukraine, and NATO. Like South Africa with its apartheid policies during the second half of the last century, Russia should lose the privilege of competing as a nation due to its unprovoked attacks on Ukraine and its civilian population, as well as its widespread, state sponsored doping program.

It is unlikely Russia would have felt brazen enough to attack Ukraine if Putin had not sensed complacency and a lack of will and purpose in the West, including in the sports world. Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Gianni Infantino, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), and all their corporate sponsors and broadcast partners, like NBC, have been complicit in facilitating Russian and Chinese sportswashing propaganda, simply to make more money for themselves and/or their organizations. That complicity, along with the Chinese government’s strategic support of Russia for economic reasons, has encouraged and facilitated Putin’s maniacal acts of unconstrained aggression and war crimes in Ukraine.

Insisting Upon Democratic Values and Principles in International Spectator Sports

The IOC and FIFA, as well as the World-Antidoping Agency (WADA), should be reformed and arguably replaced, in order to eliminate widespread political corruption and other wrongdoing, both in Olympic sports and professional soccer. The totalitarian influences of Russia and China should be substantially reduced by insisting upon democratic policies. Who actually needs international sports more? The Russians and Chinese, or the U.S. and its NATO allies?

If the Olympics and professional soccer existed without Russia and China, those sports would still thrive. On the other hand, without the U.S. and its NATO allies, there would be no Olympics, no IOC, no FIFA. In addition, the U.S. still would have the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAA, MLS, PGA, WNBA, and NWSL and other spectator sports. In a Twenty First Century sports cold war, the West would prevail, as long as it is united. The West should stop—in exchange for blood money—catering to Russia and China, much less to Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

The U.S. and its allies should work to ensure that democratic values, principles, and policies are implemented and enforced in international sports. If China chooses not to participate as a result, which is unlikely, so be it. Russia under Putin already is a lost cause, as is North Korea. And Saudi Arabia is pretty much irrelevant to the success or failure of most international sports, even though the Saudis have been desperately trying to obtain a foothold in golf, tennis, and soccer, by showering certain big-name, white male athletes, like Phil Mickelson and David Beckham, with money and the allure of even more money.

Russian and Belarusian Athletes

While international sports are being reformed, the controversial question of how to deal with Russian and Belarusian athletes should be addressed also in a democratic manner. It certainly would not be fair, just, or wise to presume that because an athlete is Russian or Belarusian, he, she, or they will choose to actively support Russia’s government under Putin. It is not even fair, just, or wise to force Russian or Belarusian athletes to condemn Putin and the Russian government before allowing them to compete.  

What would be reasonable, though, is to continue to no longer recognize any Russian or Belarusian-controlled sports organizations and authorities, but to give Russian and Belarusian athletes and their coaches more alternatives than you may not compete. The objective would be to strongly encourage those athletes to distance themselves from the Russian and Belarusian governmental controls.

In World War II, Americans made the grave mistake of presuming that anyone who was Japanese was an enemy of the United States. We put hundreds of thousands of Japanese-American citizens in prison-like detention camps out of fear, hate, and prejudice. Even today, we continue to see such hate-mongering being manifested against Asian-American citizens and residents. This has been an egregious injustice that should not be revisited upon athletes merely because they were born in, or their families immigrated from, Russia or Belarus.

Many Russian athletes play or coach for American teams, especially in the National Hockey League. Other great Russian athletes like Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev, and Maria Sharapova play or have played individual sports like tennis, internationally. Sofia Kenin is Russian-American and Victoria Azarenka is Belarusian-American. Both are female American tennis stars.

In addition, there are a multitude of talented Russian and Belarusian athletes in professional and Olympic sports, including ice skating, gymnastics, track and field, hockey and soccer. Those athletes should have the opportunity to compete going forward for entities or sports authorities that do not represent Russia or Belarus.

In team sports and professional tennis this is relatively easy to accomplish. Those athletes already represent their leagues and franchises or, in tennis, the Association of Tennis Professionals or the Women’s Tennis Association. That said, those Russian or Belarusian athletes earning their living in North America or Europe, who have supported Putin in the past—most notably hockey great Alex Ovechkin—should make it clear they do not support the Russian government’s war against Ukraine, if they expect fans to continue to embrace them as athletes and role models.  

For athletes and coaches who have been competing for Russian or Belarusian sports organizations, most notably for the Russian Olympic Committee, the transition undoubtedly will be more difficult. It will take some accommodations by various international sports bodies and national governments.

Russian and Belarusian athletes and coaches should be encouraged to choose to defect where it is in their interests to do so and be allowed to immediately represent the nation where they defect. This will protect the rights of those athletes and coaches, while still sending an unmistakably message to Putin.

A majority of Russian and Belarusian athletes and coaches, though, will not want to relinquish their Russian or Belarusian citizenship. That is understandable. They should be allowed to compete on teams and with sports organizations, which train and compete outside of Russia and Belarus that have no ties to the Russian government or Russian officials. Those athletes and coaches should not bear the brunt of outrage that is rightfully aimed at those two governments, the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, China, the IOC, and FIFA.       
             
]]>Mon, 21 Feb 2022 14:18:01 GMThttp://sportpathologies.com/readers-blog-plus/blog-42Extreme Emotional Damage to 15-Year-Old Russian Female Skating Prodigy Resulted Because The                              IOC Has Largely Ignored Russia’s Doping Program and Other Athletic Abuses   
                                                                  John Weston Parry
 
One would have thought that it was next to impossible to top the bad judgment and hypocrisy that surrounded the Novak Djokovic testing fiasco at the Australian Open. A month later, though, coaches and key officials directly connected with Russia and the Olympic movement, with an assist from NBC, jeopardized the emotional well-being of 15-year-old Russian skating prodigy Kamila Valieva, while allowing Russia’s state-sponsored doping program to continue, largely unchallenged.

The Beijing Olympics Doping Fiasco

As incredible as it may have seemed to most Americans following those Olympics, the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS), which has made a habit of botching its rulings, got it right in not provisionally suspending the young Russian skater. American female Olympic athletes have long complained about abuses that they have been subjected to under the harsh guidance of their coaches. Such mistreatment likely was intensified in Russia’s authoritarian sports programs for their youngest elite athletes. As the Washington Post revealed, Russian “female “teenage skaters… have left the sport with severe injuries and reported lasting eating disorders.”  Valieva is the latest victim.

The role of Russian coaches in this scandal should be a key focus of the Word Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA)-IOC inquiry and investigation. It is not unreasonable to suspect that this still immature teenager was unduly influenced, duped, or perhaps even psychologically coerced, into taking performance-enhancing drugs that could allow her to train and train, obsessively, in order to master and carry out the series of quads her historic, ground-breaking, routines required, and her notoriously brutal coach insisted upon. This fiasco raises legitimate questions whether the other two brilliant Russian teenage female skaters, who won gold and silver, respectively, also were encouraged to use—as so many Russian athletes have—performance-enhancing substances that were never detected.

Valieva tested positive in late December for Trimetazidine, a drug that helps to protect the heart when the body is repeatedly engaged in strenuous exercise. This class of drug has been commonly used by the Russian military and Russian athletes. Whether it should have been banned raises questions about the politics involved in determining which drugs should be placed on that list, especially those that may provide health benefits. On Christmas Day, however, when Valieva was tested, Trimetazidine was a well-known prohibited substance.      

The way the cat and mouse game, of catch me if you can, is played in the world of Olympic doping, is that unclean athletes stop taking banned substances long enough before the start of the Games that it will no longer produce a positive result at the Olympics, where testing is pretty much guaranteed. Thus, the fact Valieva had no positive results in Beijing is hardly surprising and no reason to doubt the legitimacy of her December test result.

That said, unfortunately there are other reasons why this lone result could have been in error. The tests are far from perfect and produce a significant percentage of false positives. They also produce a significant percentage of false negatives, especially if the athletes use various tricks of the trade to prepare their bodies to deceive the testers. As with Covid, one test by itself is not enough to reach a clear and convincing conclusion, which is why rapid and frequent testing is highly desirable, but unfortunately rarely accomplished in sports. Instead, doping officials are supposed to try to thoroughly review the circumstances in which a positive test is produced before deciding whether a suspension is warranted. All of this is done behind closed doors, and takes time.

In Valieva’s case, the Swedish lab that was being used for the Russian nationals and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA)—an oxymoron if there ever was one—did not release the test results until the Games were well-underway. Valieva already had competed, and helped the Russians win gold in the team skating competition. Whether that delay occurred because the Swedish lab screwed up or RUSADA and Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) worked behind the scenes to withhold or postpone the results, are open questions. All that the public knows is that the dissemination was delayed for an unusually long period of time and Valieva was not personally responsible for the delay.

The non-transparent, Solomon-like cut the baby in half solution the IOC, the Russians, and the anti-doping authorities fashioned to allow Valieva, who at the time was the world’s best female skater, to provisionally compete and then try to determine later what she would be deemed guilty of, if anything, was suspicious. This strategically designed compromise seemed to serve the best interests of the IOC, the ROC, the Russian and Chinese governments, NBC, and all the corporate sponsors. It did not serve the interests of the American female skaters or their fans, which is why the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee condemned the decision. Nor did it protect this vulnerable adolescent skater from exploitation.

Disturbing as well was the appearance of a double standard based on race, since African American sprinter Sha’Carrie Richardson had been prohibited from participating in the Tokyo Games after she tested positive for marijuana, which is not even a performance-enhancing substance. The legal distinctions were that: (1) Richardson was not a protected minor under IOC and WADA rules because she was 21 at the time, while Valieva is only 15; and (2) Richardson’s test result occurred well before the Tokyo Olympics had begun. Thus, it could be more thoroughly reviewed.

The practical distinction between the decisions in these two situations may have had little to do with race, and much more to do with money and television ratings. Valieva skating at these Winter Games was far more significant to the Olympic movement than Richardson sprinting last summer in competitions in which a gold medal for her was far from assured. At the same time, Richardson should never have been denied her Olympic opportunity. Using marijuana, at worst, should have been treated as a forgivable misdemeanor. Whether race was a factor in Richardson’s case we will never know because the anti-doping process lacks transparency.

This latest doping scandal, though, should not be viewed as an isolated incident involving a Russian teenager, who by all accounts was expected to become one of, if not, the greatest of all time in her sport. Valieva’s positive test result, which was delayed, directly involved RUSADA, the ROC, WADA, and IOC, all of whom have conspired in the past to allow Russia’s state sponsored doping scheme to continue without the responsible officials being held fully accountable, if accountable at all.

The entire Olympic anti-doping apparatus has been a farce, especially when the Russians have been the subjects of feigned or diminished scrutiny. Only athletes face meaningful sanctions, too often inappropriately. In typical IOC fashion the other athletes who medaled in the women’s long program were to be denied a ceremony, if Valieva had preliminarily won gold. The skaters who had medaled in the team event that Russia won, including the United States competitors who had come in second, also were denied a medal ceremony, leading the U.S. to file a protest, which the IOC summarily denied.

Tragically for Valieva, but fortuitously for an already embarrassed Olympic movement, the vulnerable teenage skating phenom had an understandable—and perhaps predictable—emotional meltdown. This was largely a result of the media condemnation that her positive test had engendered, which kept building and building. As IOC President Thomas Bach stated later— probably in part to try to protect himself and the IOC from blame—the pressure on Valieva was “beyond my imagination.”

Furthermore, her coach’s unsympathetic criticism of Valieva right afterwards revealed “tremendous coldness.” As Washington Post columnist Jerry Brewer wrote, the very young skater received “the cruelest punishment possible.” A spokesperson for Russia’s President Putin, however, defended that coach’s response, claiming such harsh criticism “is key for their athletes to achieve victories.”  Russia under Putin clearly will do almost anything to win Olympic medals.  

Russian State-Sponsored Doping Beginning in 2009

The full story behind this scandal, however, begins well-before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia. If this were fiction, the details of what happened would be almost too ludicrous to be believable. Since 1999, when the IOC created WADA, there has been little transparency, constant corruption, government and Olympic interference, and outright lies, with Russia being the worst-case scenario uncovered so far. (Who knows, though, what is going on with Chinese Olympic athletes in a country that has made secrecy, repression, government intimidation, and collaboration with the IOC an art form.)

Once Russia had been awarded the Sochi Games in 2009, IOC officials acted as if they wanted to avoid any controversies with the host nation, which, like China now, has been one of the most influential members of the Olympic movement. Both the IOC and WADA had key Russian members. These men were senior officials in the Russian government in charge of the Russian Sports Ministry and the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), respectively. 

As far back as 2010, knowledgeable Russian insiders were informing WADA officials that the Russian Sports Ministry and that nation’s anti-doping agency were encouraging, and even compelling, large numbers of Russian athletes to cheat. The Washington Post ‘s Will Hobson reported that doping among Russian Olympic athletes had been “endemic” to their training programs. Both “the government and Russia’s anti-doping agency [had been] complicit” in that conspiracy.

Yet, it took nearly five more years for WADA to investigate. Astoundingly, until 2015 the global anti-doping agency did not even have independent authority to conduct investigations and issue sanctions on its own. From 1999 when the IOC established WADA to 2015, the IOC—and not WADA—made the ultimate Olympic-related anti-doping decisions, which consistently benefitted Russia. During that period, WADA conducted tests under the IOC’s guidelines and the IOC would decide whether to investigate and issue sanctions.  

Once the IOC began working hand-in-hand with Russian government officials on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, anti-doping measures involving Russian athletes were seriously compromised. The IOC had a stake in shielding Russian President Putin, the ROC, RUSADA, and Russia’s powerful sports ministry from scrutiny to ensure the economic success of those Winter Games. Russian officials were some of the same men who would ensure that IOC members received the illicit benefits that they had come to expect from host nations.

Eventually WADA officials began to test Russian athletes, but used compromised and flawed procedures that allowed Russian sports labs to easily alter the results. It was not until 2015, eleven months after the Sochi Games had concluded, WADA finally issued a report, with the IOC’s input and approval, accusing the Russian government of orchestrating a pervasive scheme to create a secret doping program for their athletes.

Even after WADA issued its belated report, very little changed. As I concluded in The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame, “[d]espite the scope and grandeur of the accusations …, the IOC-approved WADA sanctions were remarkably restrained.” Rather than penalizing Russian government officials, WADA rescinded “the accreditation of a lab in Moscow at the center of the scandal.’ That “lab not only had destroyed hundreds of drug samples of Russian athletes, but had produced undetectable drugs for athletes to use.”

The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), under the leadership of its new president Sebastian Coe, agreed “to indefinitely suspend the entire Russian track-and-field team.” After discussing the matter with influential Russian sports officials, though, Coe relented and gave them “the opportunity to make changes… that could lead to the lifting of the ban well before the [2016 Summer Games in Rio].” The other Russian sports federations and Russian sports officials were never even sanctioned. Ultimately, only the Russian Track and Field team was sanctioned at the Rio Games. Furthermore, many of those athletes were allowed to participate under the tarnished ROC flag, as long as there was no convincing proof that they had cheated.

The president of USA Track & Field conceded that many of those Russian athletes were paying the price for the transgressions of the Olympic agencies affiliated with the Russian government. Russian female pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva put it more bluntly: the overly broad sanctions against those athletes like herself were “a violation of human rights.”

Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins agreed. She wrote that while the IOC was refusing to investigate the role of the Russian government in the state-sponsored doping scandal, IOC members in Sochi had “dined from the ice-sculpture and sipped their aperitifs.” The IOC were hypocrites for blaming Russian athletes “whose choice was to either participate in doping… or face angry state authorities, maybe even a gulag.” Sanctioning Russian athletes, she opined, “conveniently divert[ed] attention from the IOC’s own misdeeds, the offenses that they either committed or enabled and ignored.”

By 2016, even IOC President Thomas Bach was compelled to acknowledge that the international anti-doping system was rife with structural deficiencies, including unseemly “politics and possible conflicts of interest.” He recommended that WADA—the IOC’s partner of nearly twenty years—become structurally independent of the organizations that it was supposed to monitor and investigate. Yet, even today WADA receives funding and directions from sports under its jurisdiction, including the IOC and its affiliates, and allows them to help tailor the anti-doping protocols and penalties governing their sports.

Following the Rio Games, new exposes surfaced about doping schemes that Russian government officials had implemented. The most damning were first-hand accounts of the clandestine destruction of hundreds of positive test results in Russian labs. Prominent Russian whistleblower, chemist Grigory Rodchenkov, fled to America and built a career for himself as a witness to this scheme.

Much of what Rodchenkov was alleging could not be proven or disproven, convincingly, because the Russians had either buried or destroyed key evidence. WADA and IOC officials concluded Rodchenkov’s version of events probably was true. Those officials were happy to shift the spotlight away from themselves. Furthermore, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that Russian officials had orchestrated an elaborate program to encourage—and push—their athletes to use illicit performance-enhancing substances.

In light of the mounting evidence and global outrage, the IOC decided to ban all Russian athletes from the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, unless they could establish their innocence—guilty unless proven innocent. In addition, no Russian athletes were allowed to compete as representatives of Russia. Instead, those athletes represented the ROC, which had been directly involved in Russian state-sponsored doping.

The real villains in this sports travesty, which included President Putin, the Russian Sports Ministry, and the ROC, were never sanctioned or received slaps on the wrist. The IOC temporarily suspended the ROC, as well as its president, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov. Remarkably, until December, 2017 Zhukov had been helping his fellow IOC members make decisions about what should happen to Russian athletes and sports officials in wake of the Russian doping scandal.

The IOC eventually banned Vitaly Mutko, the long-time head of the Russian Sports Ministry, from participating or attending Olympic events. Nonetheless, Pavel Kolobkov, who had been in charge of Russia’s fraudulent anti-doping program, was allowed to assume Mutko’s duties. In addition, President Putin then appointed Mutko to become the Deputy Prime Minister overseeing all Russian sports. In that capacity, the deposed Russian Sport Minister was placed in charge of Russia’s 2018 World Cup preparations.

Mutko’s was assuming this new role, even though he and one of his deputies had been accused of concealing and covering up hundreds of doping violations, including a documented case involving a Russian soccer player. Much like what the IOC had done with respect to the Sochi Winter Games, FIFA officials summarily dismissed Mutko’s linkage to the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal saying it would have no impact on “preparations for the tournament.” After key World Cup corporate sponsors expressed their displeasure, however, Mutko stepped down as president of the Russian soccer federation, but retained his position as Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of sports.

After the World Cup, WADA conditionally reinstated Russia as a member in good standing, ignoring the fact that Russian officials still had not come close to meeting the terms of the compliance agreement they had signed. Incredibly, the Russians were permitted to resume using RUSADA and their own disgraced Moscow lab to test their athletes for banned substances. In exchange for those naive—and arguably corrupt—considerations, the Russians promised to finally allow WADA inspectors to visit the lab and give them access to the testing data that had been hidden for so long.
WADA President Craig Reedie prematurely proclaimed vindication. By the time the inspectors arrived, though, key incriminating evidence had been destroyed. Also, Russian officials had fabricated exculpatory messages, claiming they had been sent by the whistle-blower Rodchenko.

In December 2019 WADA, in consultation with IOC and FIFA officials, responded to this latest breach of faith by once again issuing remarkably weak sanctions. Russia would be banned from participating for four years, including the 2020 Summer Olympic (which were postponed until 2021 due to Covid), the 2022 Winter Olympics, and the 2022 World Cup. However, unless it could be demonstrated that they had been doping, Russian athletes would be allowed to compete as representatives of the ROC, which continued to be involved in the Russian doping scandal and its cover up.

Craig Reedie the WADA President gushed that “[t]he blatant breach by Russian authorities… demanded a robust response. That is exactly what has been delivered.” Members of the U.S. Olympic movement strongly disagreed. Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, characterized WADA’s ruling as “yet another devastating blow to clean athletes, the integrity of the sport and the rule of law.” The Russian whistleblower Rodchenkov opined that “Russia’s falsifications and cheating continued… even when Russia was under scrutiny. As usual Russia has disregarded all of its promises and obligations to clean sport.”

Making matters worse, the Court for Arbitration for Sport, which really is not a court at all, reduced that already paltry ban from four to two years for no discernible reason other than Russian influence in the global sports world. This means, unless something changes, Russia will be able to compete as a nation in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, as if nothing had ever happened.

For the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games, more than 300 Russian athletes participated under the auspices of the corrupt ROC. They finished right behind the United States and China for the most medals. Then, at the politically-charged and ultimately unsatisfying, 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, all those same Russian, Olympic, and anti-doping entities constructed a convenient way forward, which allowed Valieva to compete, despite having tested positive for a banned substance. At the same time, though this solution worked to create psychological barriers that would prevent the very young and vulnerable athlete from further embarrassing the skating world should she win a medal, as she had been expected to do.  

Conclusion

What ultimately will happen following a more thorough investigation into Valieva’s doping violation and how it arose and was originally handled, is anyone’s guess. Based on past WADA-IOC collaborations involving Russia, an honest and transparent inquiry is unlikely. The accused athlete’s fait probably depends on how a conviction or acquittal will affect the global standing of the WADA, the IOC, and the International Skating Union, as well as the influence the Russians can bring to bear on the Olympic movement.

Based on how the Russian women’s skating program spits out teenage prodigies and the coldness displayed by her head coach when the skater had her meltdown, Valieva’s competitive skating career may be over, or at least substantially diminished. Even a reduced suspension when combined with the athletic obstacles created by her having to transition from a physically immature and emotionally damaged child to a top flight nineteen-year-old skater for the 2026 Winter Olympics, appears to be a monumental challenge.

Should she be acquitted based on a plea or finding of undue influence, a due process error, or some technicality, Valieva still would have to deal with the widely held perception that she sullied her sport and the Olympics itself by cheating. NBC expert commentators, Johnny Weir and Tara Lapinski, repeatedly and unconditionally criticized Valieva, without mentioning her coach’s influence or the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal. Much of the Olympic skating community continues to embrace Russia. Weir himself is closely tied to Russia and the Russian skating program, much more so than to the American skating program.

What NBC and its experts left unsaid, in a colossal lapse of journalistic standards, was that this doping scandal probably would not have happened if: (1) Russia had turned over a new leaf and genuinely pursued the value of clean sports; and (2) Olympic and anti-doping officials had not continued to be incompetent and corrupt for so long. Instead, they crucified Valieva.

Accountability for the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal and this latest travesty that it has created, indicates: (1) Russian Olympic sports deserve to be placed in receivership for the foreseeable future; and (2) WADA and the IOC should be substantially reformed.
 
Russian Olympic sports receivership would mean that there would be no ROC or RUSADA or the use of Russian labs, for many years. Russian athletes would compete for the Russian people under the Russian flag or find ways to compete for other nations, like Chinese-American Eileen Gu, who won two gold medals and one silver for China. The duties of the ROC and RUSADA should be carried out by an Olympic committee independent of Russian influence using non-Russian anti-doping officials and labs.

Moreover, WADA should be replaced, or dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. The resulting global anti-doping apparatus should be verifiably independent of the IOC, its affiliates, and all the other sports, which have programs under the anti-doping agency’s jurisdiction.

​As for the IOC, it too badly needs to be reformed. This should include: eliminating its anti-doping enforcement powers and influence over WADA; establishing a well-funded, independent International Center for Safe Sport to protect all athletes, but especially minors; changing the selection process for host nations; and placing obstacles in the way of countries who try to use the Olympics to sportswash their human rights violations or athletic abuses.   
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