Olympian Beckie Scott on Russian doping: Cheaters always cheat

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This is a conversation series by Donna Kennedy-Glans, a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister, featuring newsmakers and intriguing personalities.

Why were we not surprised that teenage figure skater Kamila Valieva was caught doping and finally stripped of a gold medal awarded to her at the Winter Olympics in Beijing two years ago?

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Valieva is Russian. Prior to the competition, Russian athletes were officially banned from competing by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). No matter. She competed in Beijing as an independent athlete.

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Imagine — getting to the Winter Olympics, being allowed to compete as an independent, and still cheating. Valieva’s lawyers explained that a strawberry dessert, prepared by her grandfather, contaminated her results.

“First, it was anti-doping, now it’s an illegal war,” rails retired Canadian Olympic cross-country skier, Beckie Scott, reflecting on the irony of Russia invading Ukraine mere days after the Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing. “You know what neutrality at the Olympics looks like with Russia?” she continues, “It’s a farce. It’s an absolute joke.”

Funny then that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently decided to give individual Russians a pass to compete in this summer’s Olympic Games in France. Russians in Paris will be deemed “neutral.”

Doping scandals are personal for Beckie Scott. She was the first North American woman to win Olympic gold in her sport — after the two Russian competitors who crossed the finish line ahead of her at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City were stripped of their medals for doping .

“We were working so hard as cross-country skiers. It’s such a hard sport,” Beckie recalls. “But we were coming up short, results-wise, all the time.” “Why?” she asks, “because we were on a completely uneven playing field.”

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Beckie invites me into her home in Canmore, Alberta. She’s dressed comfortably in an off-white oversized cardigan, jeans and creamy-white wool slippers. Perched on stools at her kitchen counter, she updates me on her present endeavours as she boils water for tea and pours the steaming brew into mugs. A bouquet of yellow tulips on a nearby table brightens the February wintry day.

Since retiring from competitive sport in 2006, Beckie’s been an ambassador for cross-country — volunteering at events like the World Cup hosted at the Canmore Nordic Centre in February, and travelling to far-flung First Nations reserves to teach kids how to ski. The latter initiative has morphed into Spirit North, a non-profit she founded in 2017 to work with Indigenous kids — urban and rural — and get them into a wide range of sports.

Throughout, she’s been an unwavering champion for clean athletes, even chairing the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Athlete Committee from 2014-2019, during the worst of the Russian doping scandals.

Deliberately, I turn my back to the floor-to-ceiling windows, to avoid being distracted by the panorama of the majestic Canadian Rockies, and focus all my attention on this 49-year-old woman who has seen the dark side of sports.

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After what she’s been through, how is she not jaded?

Beckie grew up in Vegreville, a small town in central Alberta, the kind of place where you won’t have a lot of friends if you cheat. Still, it’s hard to reconcile her wide smile and warm demeanour with the steely will required to fight fraudulent dope-testing and advocate for clean sport, all the while being ignored or patronized by the power brokers of Olympic sport.

You know what neutrality at the Olympics looks like with Russia?… It’s a farce.

Olympian Beckie Scott

Doping became normalized among Russian competitors in a range of strength or endurance sports — cycling, cross-country skiing, weightlifting, swimming, skating — the former Olympian explains matter-of-factly. “It was most prevalent in our sport, so our federation was talking about it, our head coaches were talking about it. But I don’t think people knew what to do, necessarily, about it,” Scott recalls.

“It wasn’t just the Olympic medals, she continues. “Doing better in the sport equates to financial rewards, attention, recognition… Our careers were totally thwarted by it; the inability to break into that circle of success.”

Her startling recollections trigger flashbacks — memories of trying to do business abroad in places where corruption is rampant, knowing if you remained silent not only would you be complicit, but you’d also forever be at a disadvantage.

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“Yeah,” Beckie nods. “I often liken it to working at a company and you go down to collect your cheque in the mailroom and someone else walks by and takes it from you. And everybody looks the other way. Yeah, that’s what it was like.”

And what of her efforts with Spirit North — to bring sports to Indigenous kids — how does she know she’s levelling their playing field?

“There’s a lot of acknowledgment, there’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of papers, there’s a lot of workshops, there’s a lot of efforts, you know, corporate efforts to tick a box,” Beckie explains. But within the Indigenous communities, she says, real change isn’t happening anywhere near fast enough.

She doesn’t hide her frustration with the federal government’s “unpredictable and unreliable” funding. “You give us six months of funding and ask for a report,” she laments, “it just feels so hollow.”

Beckie has a realistic grasp on the systemic challenges faced by Indigenous kids, their uphill battles. She remains undeterred: “If one kid reaches for their running shoes, or goes on a bike ride, or goes and gets their skis when they’re feeling frustrated or stressed, instead of reaching for something else, then we’ve succeeded.”

“Not unlike the anti-doping [advocacy], I just couldn’t say, this is not my problem,” she says, flashing that bright smile.

In an ideal future, where Beckie gets to do what the girl’s gotta do, adults and officials in the room would get called out for turning a blind eye. There’d be no room for “neutral.”

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