- The Rio Olympics are approaching and NBC is preparing for coverage
- The Olympics are often accompanied by sappy athlete profiles and inspiring videos
- However, there are also doping scandals that cast a shadow over the games
- A report reveals that Russian secret agents and a Moscow laboratory were involved in state-sanctioned doping
- Russian athletes and trainers were filmed handing out drugs
- Russia is accused of tampering with samples and using a secret hole in the laboratory wall
- The prevalence of doping is surprising considering the rigorous testing regimes in place
- Testing can be flawed and athletes can use various methods to cheat the system
- Some athletes have come up with creative excuses for positive tests
- The financial incentives and pressure to win contribute to the prevalence of doping
- The monitoring system for doping is compromised in some countries
- The Russian track and field team is currently banned from competing in the Olympics.

- The current system for testing and preventing doping in sports is a mess
- The Russian track and field federation (ARAF) is under the control of both the international governing body (IAAF) and the Russian Ministry of Sport
- The Russian anti-doping agency (RUSADA) has been involved in bribery and giving advance notice of tests
- The head of the IAAF's anti-doping department was banned for 5 years
- The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) initially did not have the power to investigate inside Russia
- WADA's head sent a friendly email to a Russian sports minister's advisor, raising concerns about their independence
- Former head of WADA, Dick Pound, believes that there is no general appetite to deliver doping-free sports
- Doping is not just a Russian problem, but affects the entire world of sports
- Two choices to address the issue: empower WADA to be truly independent or make athlete promos more honest

The speaker dreams of winning in Rio, comparing it to a Cinderella story where Cinderella takes drugs to fit into the slipper and lives happily ever after with Prince Charming.

- NBC is preparing for coverage of the upcoming Rio Olympics, which are often accompanied by inspiring videos and athlete profiles.
- However, there are doping scandals that cast a shadow over the games, with a report revealing Russian involvement in state-sanctioned doping.
- The prevalence of doping is surprising considering the rigorous testing regimes in place, but flaws in testing and various cheating methods contribute to this issue.
- Financial incentives and pressure to win also contribute to the prevalence of doping.
- The current system for testing and preventing doping in sports is a mess, with compromised monitoring systems and corruption within anti-doping agencies.
- The Russian track and field team is currently banned from competing in the Olympics due to these doping scandals.
- Doping is not just a Russian problem, but affects the entire world of sports.
- Two choices to address the issue are empowering the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to be truly independent or making athlete promos more honest.

Doping scandals have cast a shadow over the Olympic Games. Until we eliminate drugs from sports, we should at least update our athlete promos.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ The Olympics, otherwise known as your biennial reminder that NBC exists.

The Rio games are just around the corner, so get ready for plenty of sappy athlete profiles like these.

Tori Bui is a sprinter climbing her way to the top.

Her success exceeds far beyond the unkempt field she started on in high school.

At his childhood pool, there's still a bench where he was forced to sit and take timeouts.

But what others struggle to contain in daily life, Phelps put to full purpose when there was something on the line.

Burroughs is powered by the elemental truth of the sport that fills his dreams.

Those videos aren't just uplifting, that's basically inspiration porn.

That's what a fireworks display watch is when it wants to jerk off.

But while the Olympics feature thrilling displays of athletic prowess, they can also take place beneath the dark shadow cast by doping scandals.

According to a report that reads like a Cold War spy thriller, Russian secret agents and a mysterious Moscow laboratory were used for state-sanctioned doping.

A Russian athlete and trainer secretly filmed drugs being handed out like candy.

Russia accused staggeringly of using its security services, its new KGB, to tamper with supposedly tamper-proof bottles, allegedly using this hole in the laboratory wall to switch samples.

A Russian lab used a secret hole in the wall in an attempt to win Olympic medals, making this the first known example of a literal glory hole.

--LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE --And just listen, just listen to how the athletes ingested some of the drugs in the first place.

Ron Chenkoff's cocktails of 3 different performance-enhancing drugs were, on his instructions, washed down by athletes with alcohol to shorten the detection period.

Chivas for male athletes, Vermouth for the ladies.

Look, I get doping is still going on, but I'd hoped that unnecessarily gendered illegal products died out with the Virginia Slims crack pipe.

Now, Russia's track and field team is currently banned from competing at the upcoming Olympics, but there is nothing new about this story.

For as long as there's been science, people have used it to juice the human body.

In the 1920s, a Russian-born French surgeon grafted thin slices of chimp testicles into people's scrotums, which was obviously ridiculous.

These days we know, you need a thick slice of chimp testicles, that's when it starts to work.

And there's a long history of athletes circumventing the rules.

In the 1904 Olympics, 1 of the marathon runners rode 11 miles in a car.

A move that takes balls so big, they must have included a massive slice of chimp nuts.

Now, as for the modern era, while no 1 knows exactly how many athletes dope, there are some shocking hints.

1 leaked survey found that an estimated 29% of track and field athletes at the 2011 World Championships said that they had doped in the past year.

And presumably, that doesn't even include roided-out athletes who responded by yelling, -"So they make me angry!" -$MONEY $ crumpling it up and throwing it to the moon.

-$MONEY $ But the prevalence of doping is a little surprising when you consider how rigorous the testing regimes in top sport can be.

Watch what happens to 1 runner just seconds after she crosses the finish line.

From now until she's able to provide a sample, 2 things will be constant.

Water and Flanagan's anti-doping chaperone.

The chaperone makes sure the athlete doesn't try to cheat her drug test.

Because you're really excited and you want to enjoy the moment, but then at the same time, yeah, you got to get focused and get ready to pee.

Now, that's got to be tough, because you're probably not ready to pee on command just after finishing a race.

That's not what your body is prepared to do at that moment.

It's like asking someone to have an orgasm in the middle of test driving a Nissan Cube.

And if you think it's no fun for the athletes, it's not much fun for the testers either.

Real Sports followed 1 of them on a surprise out-of-competition test.

His task this early Saturday morning is to collect a sample from an elite rower named Alex Zossels.

Alex agreed to let us film the moment of truth.

Lowell is required to witness and have an unobstructed view.

That is the face of a man reconsidering every single decision he has made in his life.

While also desperately wishing that athlete had not had asparagus for dinner.

--LAUGHTER --But despite rigorous testing, athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks for a number of reasons.

For a start, there are multiple tests, and none of them can detect the full range of drugs an athlete might be on, from anabolic steroids, to EPO, to human growth hormone, to The most powerful drug of all, love.

And testing itself, it's much less black and white than you might assume.

There are wide variations in human biochemistry, so to avoid false positives, testing thresholds are often deliberately high, and athletes can dope and still come below those thresholds by doing things like micro-dosing or using masking agents to hide banned substances.

And those are just some ways that it's possible for top athletes to cheat while still being able to say things like this.

Do they say, has Lance Armstrong ever tested positive?

Remember, this is a man who looked America dead in the eyes and said, bicycling is a very cool sport, and we fucking believed him.

--LAUGHTER --And the techniques some athletes have used to beat the system have been amazingly imaginative.

Take, for instance, the European cyclists who would insert condoms of clean urine into their anus, and then, in order to conceal everything, would cover it with fake hair, blending into the real hair of the nether regions.

And you have to imagine that to convince a cyclist to do that, A coach would need to deliver the most inspirational speech in the history of sports.

Then you jam in that piss balloon, pick up that hot glue gun, slap on that anus-murkin, and ride like a champion!

-...and when they have tested positive, the excuses have been even more imaginative.

Former sprinter, Dennis Mitchell, insisted his positive test for testosterone was the result of having sex at least 4 times the night before and drinking 5 bottles of beer.

And if that is what your life is like, you don't really need the Olympics.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Now, other athletes have blamed positive tests on eating a pie made from doped up racing pigeons, or eating a stew of meat and organs from uncastrated boars.

And I'll say this, if Wheaties is really the breakfast of champions, their ingredient list will now include pigeon meat and pig jizz, or it's over.

But none of that beats my favourite excuse of all time.

Cyclist Tyler Hamilton had to explain why somebody else's blood was in his veins.

He claimed a vanished twin absorbed by his body in the womb.

I'm your brother, Tyler, and my name isn't John Oliver.

And together, we are Skyler and Tyler Hamilton.

♪ And in a way, in a way, you can see why athletes might want to dope.

A split-second advantage can make the difference between winning and losing, and there's a lot of money on the line for everyone.

There is a massive financial ecosystem dependent on spectacular athletic achievement in scandal-free games.

And that includes the networks, who reap over a billion in ad sales, the IOC, which reaps billions in broadcast rights, and then there's the sponsors, who love using Olympic athletes for ads like these.

To perform your best, training's gotta be a lifelong passion.

That's why Debbie Phelps is always there for her son Michael.

With his favorite flavor-packed, fully jacked footlong subs.

Because first, no professional swimmer wants a sandwich in the pool.

And for the record, there is nothing more viscerally upsetting than a woman feeding her soaking wet, nearly naked adult son something called a fully jacked footlock.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ And when you combine, The point is, when you combine all the money incentivizing athletes to get an edge with all the imperfections of tests, you would hope there'd be a robust, independent monitoring system in place.

Unfortunately, some countries lack the resources for strong testing, while others seem to lack the desire.

And to get a sense of just how compromised the system can become, let's go back to what happened in Russia, because here's how things worked.

This is a Russian track and field athlete.

He would compete for his national sports federation, in this case, ARAF.

That federation would be under both the international body governing track and field, the IAAF, and the Russian Ministry of Sport, which is, of course, part of the Russian government.

Now, separately, he would be tested by his country's anti-doping agency, in this case, RUSADA, who would send it to a laboratory which is credited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which receives funding from both the IOC and countries like Russia.

And already, you can see This system looks like a sprawling mess.

But I guess technically, it could work if each step was genuinely committed to stamping out doping.

However, you've already seen that that 1 lab had a glory hole, and on top of that, a recent investigation found that RUSADA officers routinely accepted bribes from athletes and gave them advance notice of when they'd be tested.

And it also found the former head of ARAF had worked with the director of that Glory Hold lab to conceal positive drug tests.

And while you would hope that the IAAF would have been rooting all of this out, the head of their anti-doping department was banned for 5 years after an ethics investigation.

At which point, this is all actually making FIFA look good.

-♪ FIFA music plays ♪ -And they are basically just the mafia with slightly better branding.

Now, they are supposed to help prevent things like this, but their investigation of the scandal got off to a rocky start, because we really only have all this information thanks to a whistleblower, a former Rusada employee named Vitaly Stepanov.

He approached WADA with a great deal of information, but their response was not reassuring.

He sent 200 emails and 50 letters detailing what he had witnessed.

But Fatali says WADA told him it did not have the power to investigate inside Russia.

At that point, WADA didn't have the explicit authority, but that's a bit weird in and of itself.

You don't want the Global Anti-Drug Agency to basically have the authority of mall cops.

Stop or I'll be forced to go straight to the food court and grumble about your behavior into a bag of Wetzel's pretzel cinnabits.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And while WADA now has more authority and has appointed an independent commission to investigate the evolving Russia scandal, their head, Craig Reedy, sent a weirdly cozy email to an advisor to the Russian sports minister saying, on a personal level, I value the relationship I have with the minister, and there is no intention in WADA to do anything to affect that relationship.

Which is an unsettlingly chummy tone for a regulator to take.

If Tom Colicchio promised to judge Top Chef fairly, but then said to 1 contestant, I value my relationship with you, and will do nothing to affect it.

The other contestants would rightly think, this is clearly pointless, here's a hot pocket, go fuck yourself.

And at this point, I'm supposed to tell you that Russian officials and the former head of ARAF have broadly denied all these accusations, and for his part, Reedy says he's done nothing to interfere with the commission's investigations, and his email had been misconstrued.

And while this clearly isn't the system we need, it might actually be the system we want.

Just listen to former head of WADA, the phenomenally named Dick Pound, who has a depressing theory about why more dopers aren't caught.

The question is, do people really want it to work?

I mean, You can do hundreds of thousands of tests and catch nobody if you don't want to catch anybody.

Okay, well, first, Dick Pound should really insist that everyone call him Rick or Rich if he really wants anyone to fully listen to him.

But second, he actually wrote a report for WADA assessing the state of drug testing, which found, among the broader sports community, there is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense to deliver doping-free sports, which is pretty alarming.

We're treating good testing like calorie counts on restaurant menus.

Oh, everyone might say they want it, until they find out that 1 blooming onion is 32 million calories, and then they are fucking done.

And you might be thinking, well, let's just give up.

For a start, that could be very dangerous, with athletes tempted to take greater and greater amounts to get that split-second edge.

And it could also potentially force clean athletes to dope, at which point, you've pretty much destroyed the integrity of sport.

Because if you want to know what it's like to compete against an artificially enhanced athlete, Just listen to Alicia Montano.

She lost at the 2012 Olympics to Maria Savanova, 1 of the Russian athletes implicated in the current doping scandal.

This was the first time Montano allowed herself to watch the race she lost to gold medalist Maria Savanova.

Montano had led the race for about 600 meters before finishing fifth.

I mean, Savanova passed you like you were, with all due respect.

At that moment, I realized, I'm racing against robots.

And it wasn't just Savanova, because Silver and Bronze went to a room bar and a roided-out Teddy Ruxpin.

And when she competed against those same Russian athletes at the World Championships the next year, it was déjà vu.

Savanova blew by her in the last 50 meters to finish second.

All Montaño could do was throw herself across the finish line, beaten, and for the first time, broken.

And I felt really failed and really betrayed, and I actually felt like my career was a farce.

She's a world-class athlete, and she was left feeling like anyone who paid for a ticket to Now You See Me 2.

And look, we focused on Russia here because the details are spectacular, but they are far from the only offenders.

In recent years, Kenya, Jamaica, and China have all had doping scandals, and American athletes have cheated too.

Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay have both been banned for doping in the past, yet they're still expected to compete in Rio for the U.S.

It's far from just a Russian problem, it's something that adversely affects the entire world.

So, it feels like we have 2 choices at this point.

If we truly want to clean up sports, we should empower WADA by making it truly independent and put pressure on the broader sports system to aggressively combat doping.

And if we don't really care enough to make changes, we should at the very least make our syrupy athlete promos a bit more honest.

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved to run.

My parents sometimes tell me I could run before I could walk, which doesn't really make sense, but I always believed them.

And Olympic hopeful Brandon Schmidt has already been at the gym for 2 hours with his coach.

I've been working with Brandon ever since he was 8 years old.

I discovered him sprinting across the playground.

Just hang out at playgrounds, look for the quickest kid.

For Brandon, every morning it's the same routine.

Then it's just all the pills I could cram into my mouth.

Brandon's road to Rio began years ago, in a small bedroom in Darbyville, Ohio.

When I was a kid, I had posters of all my heroes.

Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, Ben Johnson, Mark McGuire, and that 1 guy who took a car for 11 miles of an Olympic marathon.

From those modest beginnings, Coach Jason Clark helped fill Brandon with the stuff winners are made of.

Cat dick, dog dick, lizard dick, rhino dick, badger balls, muskrat anuses, chipmunk fists, moose face, a five-hour energy shot straight into his eyeball.

1 time I put a tampon full of jet fuel up his ass.

Another time, I got Regis Bilbin to scream into a jar and then had him inhale him.

But even the most prepared athlete can sometimes get caught, and that's when Brandon relies on Coach Clark's strict regimen of excuses.

I was walking down this dark back alley, and a guy came up and stabbed me with a Strenchful VPO.

Now, with his eyes on Rio and Olympic gold, Brandon Schmidt is hoping that his years of hard work will finally pay off.

For me, to win in Rio, That'd be a fairy tale come true, you know?

But, like, if the slipper didn't actually belong to Cinderella and she took a lot of drugs to change the size of her foot to fit in the slipper, and then Prince Charming fell for it, and they lived happily ever after.


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ The Olympics, otherwise known as your biennial reminder that NBC exists. The Rio games are just around the corner, so get ready for plenty of sappy athlete profiles like these.

Speaker 1: Tori Bui is a sprinter climbing her way to the top. Her success exceeds far beyond the unkempt field she started on in high school.

Speaker 2: At his childhood pool, there's still a bench where he was forced to sit and take timeouts. But what others struggle to contain in daily life, Phelps put to full purpose when there was something on the line. Burroughs is powered by the elemental truth of the sport that fills his dreams.

Speaker 0: Yes! Those videos aren't just uplifting, that's basically inspiration porn. That's what a fireworks display watch is when it wants to jerk off. But while the Olympics feature thrilling displays of athletic prowess, they can also take place beneath the dark shadow cast by doping scandals. And this Olympics is no exception.

Speaker 3: According to a report that reads like a Cold War spy thriller, Russian secret agents and a mysterious Moscow laboratory were used for state-sanctioned doping. A Russian athlete and trainer secretly filmed drugs being handed out like candy.

Speaker 4: Russia accused staggeringly of using its security services, its new KGB, to tamper with supposedly tamper-proof bottles, allegedly using this hole in the laboratory wall to switch samples.

Speaker 0: It's true. A Russian lab used a secret hole in the wall in an attempt to win Olympic medals, making this the first known example of a literal glory hole. --LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE --And just listen, just listen to how the athletes ingested some of the drugs in the first place.

Speaker 5: Ron Chenkoff's cocktails of 3 different performance-enhancing drugs were, on his instructions, washed down by athletes with alcohol to shorten the detection period. Chivas for male athletes, Vermouth for the ladies.

Speaker 0: Wait, wait. Vermouth for the ladies? Look, I get doping is still going on, but I'd hoped that unnecessarily gendered illegal products died out with the Virginia Slims crack pipe. Hashtag feminism, hashtag crack pipes. Now, Russia's track and field team is currently banned from competing at the upcoming Olympics, but there is nothing new about this story.

For as long as there's been science, people have used it to juice the human body. In the 1920s, a Russian-born French surgeon grafted thin slices of chimp testicles into people's scrotums, which was obviously ridiculous. These days we know, you need a thick slice of chimp testicles, that's when it starts to work. And there's a long history of athletes circumventing the rules. In the 1904 Olympics, 1 of the marathon runners rode 11 miles in a car.

A move that takes balls so big, they must have included a massive slice of chimp nuts. Now, as for the modern era, while no 1 knows exactly how many athletes dope, there are some shocking hints. 1 leaked survey found that an estimated 29% of track and field athletes at the 2011 World Championships said that they had doped in the past year. And presumably, that doesn't even include roided-out athletes who responded by yelling, -"So they make me angry!" -$MONEY $ crumpling it up and throwing it to the moon. -$MONEY $ But the prevalence of doping is a little surprising when you consider how rigorous the testing regimes in top sport can be.

Watch what happens to 1 runner just seconds after she crosses the finish line.

Speaker 6: From now until she's able to provide a sample, 2 things will be constant. Water and Flanagan's anti-doping chaperone. The chaperone makes sure the athlete doesn't try to cheat her drug test.

Speaker 7: It's a big-time buzz kill. Because you're really excited and you want to enjoy the moment, but then at the same time, yeah, you got to get focused and get ready to pee.

Speaker 0: Now, that's got to be tough, because you're probably not ready to pee on command just after finishing a race. That's not what your body is prepared to do at that moment. It's like asking someone to have an orgasm in the middle of test driving a Nissan Cube. It's not going to be easy. That could take a while.

And if you think it's no fun for the athletes, it's not much fun for the testers either. Real Sports followed 1 of them on a surprise out-of-competition test.

Speaker 6: His task this early Saturday morning is to collect a sample from an elite rower named Alex Zossels. Alex agreed to let us film the moment of truth. Lowell is required to witness and have an unobstructed view.

Speaker 8: Oh, my God.

Speaker 0: That is the face of a man reconsidering every single decision he has made in his life. While also desperately wishing that athlete had not had asparagus for dinner. --LAUGHTER --But despite rigorous testing, athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks for a number of reasons. For a start, there are multiple tests, and none of them can detect the full range of drugs an athlete might be on, from anabolic steroids, to EPO, to human growth hormone, to The most powerful drug of all, love. And testing itself, it's much less black and white than you might assume.

There are wide variations in human biochemistry, so to avoid false positives, testing thresholds are often deliberately high, and athletes can dope and still come below those thresholds by doing things like micro-dosing or using masking agents to hide banned substances. And those are just some ways that it's possible for top athletes to cheat while still being able to say things like this.

Speaker 9: People are smart. Do they say, has Lance Armstrong ever tested positive? No. Has Lance Armstrong been tested? A lot.

Speaker 0: Wow. That is some confident lying. Which isn't really surprising. Remember, this is a man who looked America dead in the eyes and said, bicycling is a very cool sport, and we fucking believed him. --LAUGHTER --And the techniques some athletes have used to beat the system have been amazingly imaginative.

Take, for instance, the European cyclists who would insert condoms of clean urine into their anus, and then, in order to conceal everything, would cover it with fake hair, blending into the real hair of the nether regions. And you have to imagine that to convince a cyclist to do that, A coach would need to deliver the most inspirational speech in the history of sports. Hey, do you wanna be a champion? Do ya? Then you jam in that piss balloon, pick up that hot glue gun, slap on that anus-murkin, and ride like a champion!

Full anus,

Speaker 8: clear tests, Can't lose! Get out there! Get out there and ride!

Speaker 0: -...and when they have tested positive, the excuses have been even more imaginative. Former sprinter, Dennis Mitchell, insisted his positive test for testosterone was the result of having sex at least 4 times the night before and drinking 5 bottles of beer. And if that is what your life is like, you don't really need the Olympics. -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Now, other athletes have blamed positive tests on eating a pie made from doped up racing pigeons, or eating a stew of meat and organs from uncastrated boars. And I'll say this, if Wheaties is really the breakfast of champions, their ingredient list will now include pigeon meat and pig jizz, or it's over.

But none of that beats my favourite excuse of all time.

Speaker 10: Cyclist Tyler Hamilton had to explain why somebody else's blood was in his veins. He claimed a vanished twin absorbed by his body in the womb. The court didn't buy it.

Speaker 0: Oh. But that twin isn't vanished. It's me. I'm your brother, Tyler, and my name isn't John Oliver. It's Skyler, Skyler Hamilton.

And together, we are Skyler and Tyler Hamilton. A pair of unvanished twins. And we're both equally good at biking. -♪ Biking. ♪ -♪ Biking.

♪ And in a way, in a way, you can see why athletes might want to dope. A split-second advantage can make the difference between winning and losing, and there's a lot of money on the line for everyone. There is a massive financial ecosystem dependent on spectacular athletic achievement in scandal-free games. And that includes the networks, who reap over a billion in ad sales, the IOC, which reaps billions in broadcast rights, and then there's the sponsors, who love using Olympic athletes for ads like these.

Speaker 11: To perform your best, training's gotta be a lifelong passion.

Speaker 8: Michael!

Speaker 11: Fueled by a footlong passion. That's why Debbie Phelps is always there for her son Michael. With his favorite flavor-packed, fully jacked footlong subs.

Speaker 0: Stop. Because first, no professional swimmer wants a sandwich in the pool. And for the record, there is nothing more viscerally upsetting than a woman feeding her soaking wet, nearly naked adult son something called a fully jacked footlock. -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ And when you combine, The point is, when you combine all the money incentivizing athletes to get an edge with all the imperfections of tests, you would hope there'd be a robust, independent monitoring system in place. Unfortunately, some countries lack the resources for strong testing, while others seem to lack the desire.

And to get a sense of just how compromised the system can become, let's go back to what happened in Russia, because here's how things worked. This is a Russian track and field athlete. He would compete for his national sports federation, in this case, ARAF. That federation would be under both the international body governing track and field, the IAAF, and the Russian Ministry of Sport, which is, of course, part of the Russian government. Now, separately, he would be tested by his country's anti-doping agency, in this case, RUSADA, who would send it to a laboratory which is credited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which receives funding from both the IOC and countries like Russia.

And already, you can see This system looks like a sprawling mess. But I guess technically, it could work if each step was genuinely committed to stamping out doping. However, you've already seen that that 1 lab had a glory hole, and on top of that, a recent investigation found that RUSADA officers routinely accepted bribes from athletes and gave them advance notice of when they'd be tested. And it also found the former head of ARAF had worked with the director of that Glory Hold lab to conceal positive drug tests. And while you would hope that the IAAF would have been rooting all of this out, the head of their anti-doping department was banned for 5 years after an ethics investigation.

At which point, this is all actually making FIFA look good. FIFA. Fucking FIFA! -♪ FIFA music plays ♪ -And they are basically just the mafia with slightly better branding. And finally, there is WADA.

Now, they are supposed to help prevent things like this, but their investigation of the scandal got off to a rocky start, because we really only have all this information thanks to a whistleblower, a former Rusada employee named Vitaly Stepanov. He approached WADA with a great deal of information, but their response was not reassuring.

Speaker 12: He sent 200 emails and 50 letters detailing what he had witnessed. But Fatali says WADA told him it did not have the power to investigate inside Russia.

Speaker 0: Now, that is true. At that point, WADA didn't have the explicit authority, but that's a bit weird in and of itself. You don't want the Global Anti-Drug Agency to basically have the authority of mall cops. Hey, thief! Stop or I'll be forced to go straight to the food court and grumble about your behavior into a bag of Wetzel's pretzel cinnabits.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And while WADA now has more authority and has appointed an independent commission to investigate the evolving Russia scandal, their head, Craig Reedy, sent a weirdly cozy email to an advisor to the Russian sports minister saying, on a personal level, I value the relationship I have with the minister, and there is no intention in WADA to do anything to affect that relationship. Which is an unsettlingly chummy tone for a regulator to take. If Tom Colicchio promised to judge Top Chef fairly, but then said to 1 contestant, I value my relationship with you, and will do nothing to affect it. The other contestants would rightly think, this is clearly pointless, here's a hot pocket, go fuck yourself. And at this point, I'm supposed to tell you that Russian officials and the former head of ARAF have broadly denied all these accusations, and for his part, Reedy says he's done nothing to interfere with the commission's investigations, and his email had been misconstrued.

And you know, sure. And while this clearly isn't the system we need, it might actually be the system we want. Just listen to former head of WADA, the phenomenally named Dick Pound, who has a depressing theory about why more dopers aren't caught.

Speaker 13: Machinery's all there. The question is, do people really want it to work? I mean, You can do hundreds of thousands of tests and catch nobody if you don't want to catch anybody.

Speaker 7: Is that what you think is happening? That people don't want it to work?

Speaker 13: People don't want it to work.

Speaker 0: Okay, well, first, Dick Pound should really insist that everyone call him Rick or Rich if he really wants anyone to fully listen to him. But second, he actually wrote a report for WADA assessing the state of drug testing, which found, among the broader sports community, there is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense to deliver doping-free sports, which is pretty alarming. We're treating good testing like calorie counts on restaurant menus. Oh, everyone might say they want it, until they find out that 1 blooming onion is 32 million calories, and then they are fucking done. And you might be thinking, well, let's just give up.

Why don't we just let everyone dope? But that is definitely not the answer. For a start, that could be very dangerous, with athletes tempted to take greater and greater amounts to get that split-second edge. And it could also potentially force clean athletes to dope, at which point, you've pretty much destroyed the integrity of sport. Because if you want to know what it's like to compete against an artificially enhanced athlete, Just listen to Alicia Montano.

She lost at the 2012 Olympics to Maria Savanova, 1 of the Russian athletes implicated in the current doping scandal.

Speaker 12: This was the first time Montano allowed herself to watch the race she lost to gold medalist Maria Savanova. Montano had led the race for about 600 meters before finishing fifth. I mean, Savanova passed you like you were, with all due respect.

Speaker 14: Literally standing still.

Speaker 15: Yeah. Yeah, and you realize... At that moment, I realized, I'm racing against robots. Robots.

Speaker 8: I'm racing against robots.

Speaker 0: She's racing against robots. And it wasn't just Savanova, because Silver and Bronze went to a room bar and a roided-out Teddy Ruxpin. And when she competed against those same Russian athletes at the World Championships the next year, it was déjà vu.

Speaker 12: Savanova blew by her in the last 50 meters to finish second. All Montaño could do was throw herself across the finish line, beaten, and for the first time, broken.

Speaker 7: And I felt really failed and really betrayed, and I actually felt like my career was a farce.

Speaker 16: You know, that this is just...

Speaker 7: What am I doing out here? What's the point?

Speaker 0: What am I doing here? What's the point? She's a world-class athlete, and she was left feeling like anyone who paid for a ticket to Now You See Me 2. What are we doing here? What are any of us doing here?

What's the point in this? What are we doing? And look, we focused on Russia here because the details are spectacular, but they are far from the only offenders. In recent years, Kenya, Jamaica, and China have all had doping scandals, and American athletes have cheated too. Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay have both been banned for doping in the past, yet they're still expected to compete in Rio for the U.S.

Team. So, think of doping like Vladimir Putin. It's far from just a Russian problem, it's something that adversely affects the entire world. So, it feels like we have 2 choices at this point. If we truly want to clean up sports, we should empower WADA by making it truly independent and put pressure on the broader sports system to aggressively combat doping.

And if we don't really care enough to make changes, we should at the very least make our syrupy athlete promos a bit more honest. ♪♪

Speaker 4: Ever since I was a kid, I've loved to run. My parents sometimes tell me I could run before I could walk, which doesn't really make sense, but I always believed them.

Speaker 17: It's 5 a.m. And Olympic hopeful Brandon Schmidt has already been at the gym for 2 hours with his coach.

Speaker 18: Push it! Push it!

Speaker 8: Push it! Push it!

Speaker 19: I've been working with Brandon ever since he was 8 years old. I discovered him sprinting across the playground. That's how I used to find my runners. Just hang out at playgrounds, look for the quickest kid. Can't do that anymore, of course.

Speaker 17: For Brandon, every morning it's the same routine.

Speaker 4: First, I do cardio. Then weights. Then it's just all the pills I could cram into my mouth. Push it!

Speaker 17: Brandon's road to Rio began years ago, in a small bedroom in Darbyville, Ohio.

Speaker 4: When I was a kid, I had posters of all my heroes. Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, Ben Johnson, Mark McGuire, and that 1 guy who took a car for 11 miles of an Olympic marathon. I wanted to be just like them.

Speaker 17: From those modest beginnings, Coach Jason Clark helped fill Brandon with the stuff winners are made of.

Speaker 19: Here, you need your purples. We've tried pills containing everything. Cat dick, dog dick, lizard dick, rhino dick, badger balls, muskrat anuses, chipmunk fists, moose face, a five-hour energy shot straight into his eyeball.

Speaker 8: Ow! Ow!

Speaker 19: 1 time I put a tampon full of jet fuel up his ass. Push it! Another time, I got Regis Bilbin to scream into a jar and then had him inhale him.

Speaker 8: All of this just to get that edge.

Speaker 17: But even the most prepared athlete can sometimes get caught, and that's when Brandon relies on Coach Clark's strict regimen of excuses.

Speaker 19: And... Go!

Speaker 11: I slipped and fell

Speaker 4: in a vat of liquid amphetamines.

Speaker 19: Good. Next!

Speaker 4: I was walking down this dark back alley, and a guy came up and stabbed me with a Strenchful VPO.

Speaker 8: Sweeter! Sweeter!

Speaker 4: I ate my twin in the womb.

Speaker 0: I don't believe you! An uncastrated boar spit in my mouth.

Speaker 19: Plausible. I like you. Stick to landing.

Speaker 4: Last night I drank 5 beers and

Speaker 0: f-cked everyone in America. Time!

Speaker 4: How'd I do?

Speaker 19: You're ready.

Speaker 0: ♪ ♪

Speaker 17: Now, with his eyes on Rio and Olympic gold, Brandon Schmidt is hoping that his years of hard work will finally pay off.

Speaker 4: For me, to win in Rio, That'd be a fairy tale come true, you know? It'd be a Cinderella story. But, like, if the slipper didn't actually belong to Cinderella and she took a lot of drugs to change the size of her foot to fit in the slipper, and then Prince Charming fell for it, and they lived happily ever after. That's my dream.

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Doping: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)