While doping scandal engulfs Olympics, the one person we need to hear from is hiding

IOC president Thomas Bach was scheduled to spend his Tuesday bouncing around to various Olympic events. Snowboarding in the morning, then some speed skating and finally shooting up to the mountains to watch a little bobsled.

It was another carefree day of fandom, full of first-class travel and security details. Lots of pomp. Lots of circumstance.

He would avoid the IOC's daily press briefing, which ran late due to all the questions about doping. He offered no public statements to a world filled with concerns about fair play.

He certainly would go nowhere near the figure skating venue, where controversy over a positive drug test involving Russian star Kamila Valieva had overwhelmed not just that event, but the entire Olympics itself.

Olympians have spent the past few days expressing outrage at a decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to allow the 15-year-old Valieva to skate in the women’s individual competition despite having a banned substance in her system in a pre-Olympics test.

“She should not be allowed to compete,” said American Tara Lipinski, who won the 1998 women’s figure skating gold. “I believe this will leave a permanent scar on our sport.”

“It is a shame,” said German Katarina Witt, who won the gold in 1984 and 1988. “The responsible adults should be banned from the sport forever.”

Yet Bach has said nothing and has done nothing. He’s busy casually checking in on the bobsled like everything is fine.

Social media was a cauldron of anger. Journalists raged to the point that ones from Russia and Great Britain nearly came to blows. The failure of the IOC to adequately punish, even ban, Russia from the Olympics after previous state-sponsored doping scandals came under renewed scrutiny.

These entire Games, already beset by awfulness ranging from substandard facilities for athletes caught in Chinese COVID protocols to allegations of slave labor, torture and genocide of the Uyghur ethnic minority, had found a new bottom.

One of the Winter Olympics' signature events — women’s figure skating — is so beset by doping suspicions that the IOC itself won't stage a medal ceremony if Valieva, the gold medal favorite, is on the podium. The reasoning is there remains a decent chance she'll have to give the medal back (she is allowed to skate, but can still be found guilty later).

“It would be very difficult to allocate medals in a situation that is not final,” said IOC member Denis Oswald of Switzerland. "There is a chance you will not give the right medal to the right team. That is why we decided it would be wiser to wait.”

Why should anyone tune in then?

This is the kind of disaster that calls for leadership. Even if Bach couldn’t wave a magic wand and make it alright, he could at least be expected to show up and try.

There is no single, simple reason why the Olympics have found themselves in its current state — attracting awful television ratings in America, getting hammered for its cozy relationship with a torturous Chinese Communist Party, stuck trying to reach the finish line inside a near joyless, passionless COVID-extreme bubble.

Yet Thomas Bach is as good a place to start as any. Every step of his now almost nine-year run as IOC president has found a new depressing low, one failure begetting another failure. It's hard not to see the IOC, and the Olympic movement in general, as anything but outdated and irrelevant; corrupt, craven and cash-obsessed.

When the CCP needed Bach to help spread its propaganda about the treatment of the Uyghurs or the supposed safety of tennis star Peng Shuai, Bach couldn’t have snapped to attention quicker. He gave speeches, chatted with media and made appearances alongside Peng, who after accusing a high-level government employee of rape, has lived a life that looks a lot like that of a hostage.

On the skating controversy, however, that has done all it can to kill the spirit of sportsmanship as the Russians potentially doped up a child prodigy?

Nowhere to be seen. Nothing to be said. Does Vladimir Putin own him?

Oswald was left to explain the dizzying protocols, alphabet soup governing bodies and arbitrators of justice and offer up excuses that, while potentially well-intentioned, stood no chance in the global court of public opinion.

The average person can understand the simple: this teen from Russia who has already delivered the three highest scores of all time had a banned substance in her system … but gets to compete anyway.

That isn’t fair.

Trying, meanwhile, to navigate, let alone comprehend the roles of CAS, WADA, RUSADA, ITA, ISU, ROC and who knows what else, requires a PhD in the parlance of the IOC.

Oswald kept saying that the IOC had essentially outsourced all of the difficult disciplinary and doping decisions to supposedly independent organizations so it could avoid the appearance of conflict. Perhaps that seemed like a good idea.

In practice, the entire Olympics has descended into conflict.

Only there was no one to reassure the world that an actual competent adult was in charge that might eventually steady the ship.

Appearances matter. Even just appearing matters.

This is who Thomas Bach has proven himself to be, though. An empty suit at home in a comped hotel suite, a distant, arrogant tool of totalitarian strongmen, a president who couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge that his organization was cratering the last few days.

He was busy fiddling as a fan while the Olympics burned.