Why Countries Are Willing to Cheat for Olympic Gold

The doping allegations could prevent some Russians athletes to compete for 2016 Olympic in Rio this summer. Market Watch has an article detailing why countries are willing to cheat for Olympic gold. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the laboratory where drug testing was performed for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, alleged that it was more important for Russia to end the Olympic games with the highest medal count than to guarantee that the games ran smoothly. “The whole medal count story is for the domestic audience,” says David Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, a nonprofit organization that collects and publishes research on the Olympic movement. In highly-populated countries like Russia and China, a major Olympic medal haul sends a message of strength and stability to citizens, Wallechinsky says. In the U.S., people get very excited, “but we look at victories as belonging to the individual athletes,” says Kathleen Smith, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. “Russia sees them as belonging to the country.” (marketwatch.com)