In a surprising turn of events, the International Olympic Committee announced earlier last week that Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. The committee’s decision has been a long time coming; allegations of a state-sponsored doping system in the country date back to three years ago. Special reporter Siobhán Seigne, on academic leave (colloquially known as Education Abroad) in Russia, was able to get the inside scoop. A member of the Russian curling team was more than happy to answer some of her questions; he had nothing better to do.
The athlete, admitting to doping, plead ignorance.
“I did not know that I was doing violation,” he said in a thick Russian accent. “We were told that injection was concentration of fluid from great leader Vladimir Lenin.”
When asked to confirm this statement, a mausoleum scientist currently working in the Lenin Lab denied that the fluids were being used for doping purposes.
“We’ve actually been selling the run-off embalming fluids to OFF! brand insect repellents. They’ve been using it in their candles — it works wonders at repelling both mosquitoes and capitalist scum.”
So, what is Russia’s next step? Recent events may give us a clue. Several months ago, a radioactive cloud drifted over Europe. The cloud is believed to have originated from Russia, and happened to coincide with a period of time when Russian scientists temporarily ceased work in doping labs.
This ban on competition had been a long time coming, and the Russian Federation knew it. Unable to fix the already irreparable damage, it decided that if it were going to go down, so would everyone else.
So scientists from the so-called “Resource Federation” made use of certain leftover “resources” they had from an old site from some place called Chernobyl to produce the mysterious radioactive cloud.
The rationale is simple: If you can’t defeat your competitors during the games, prevent them from competing in the first place — by giving everyone in Western Europe a debilitating dose of radiation. Unfortunately, radioactivity levels in the cloud were declared to be of no danger to human health, leaving Russia scrambling to come up with a new plan to make their absence felt in the upcoming Olympic Games.
Russian athletes now face a choice: compete under a white flag, or boycott the games. President Putin has announced that he supports his athletes in their attendance. And besides, it’s so snowy in Russia that you would think that their flag is white anyway.
