“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver this week examined doping ahead of the Rio Olympics, from which Russia’s track and field program is banned after it was caught feeding its athletes performance enhancing drugs.
“The prevalence of doping is a little surprising when you consider how rigorous the testing regimes in top sports can be,” Oliver said. “But despite rigorous testing, athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks for a number of reasons.”
Despite leading the race for 600 meters, American 800-meter runner Alysia Montaño got out-kicked by Russian gold medalist Mariya Savinova — a major player in Russia’s state-sanctioned doping scandal — at the London games in 2012.
“At that moment,” Montaño said, “I realized I’m racing against robots.”
What’s worse, a 2013 report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency concluded, “There is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver doping-free sport.”
“We’re treating good testing like calorie counts on restaurant menus,” Oliver said. “Everyone might say they want it, until they find out that one Bloomin’ Onion® is 32 million calories and then they are fucking done.”
