Even the most seasoned travelers consider certain destinations too difficult, dangerous, or remote to explore—but the reality can be different. We found three end points that fit the bill. Yes, you’ll have to spend a lot of time in transit and adapt on the ground. But we promise it will be worth the effort.

Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal, Siberia

Here’s how I got to this oblong island in Russia’s Lake Baikal: A 5.5-hour flight from Moscow to Irkutsk (canceled once, delayed twice). Then a bone-rattling seven-hour minivan ride to a rickety dock at Sakhyurta. Finally, a ferry crossing of the deepest lake in the world, which bottoms out at more than 5,300 feet. I disembarked on an island, slightly smaller in size than New York City, that was equal parts dense boreal forest and wide-open steppe. And that was the fast way. Many travel 3.5 days from Moscow on the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway.

Only 1,500 people, many of whom are indigenous Buryat, call Olkhon home year-round. Most seasons, including winter, when the lake freezes over and tourists from China and Russia come to see unique freezing patterns on the ice, you’ll likely go days without encountering anyone. You will, however, see wildlife, from freshwater Baikal seals to wild horses. There are no paved roads or hiking trails; to get anywhere, you’ll need to ask a local for help using basic Russian. Pack a tent, download an offline map, and set out from the town of Khuzhir for the two-day, 50-mile round-trip trek through larch woodlands and along empty beaches to Cape Khoboy, on the island’s northeastern tip. , with several guest rooms (from $200) as well as campsites (from $6.50), rents paddleboards for a fauna-filled tour of the lake. It’s run by the Yeremeev family, who will make you feel at home in a place that otherwise seems like anything but. —Sebastian Modak

Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan

People used to tell Douglas Layton, owner of the local company Explore Mesopotamia, that no traveler in their right mind would ever visit the place he raved about most—Iraq. His response? “But they’ll go to the other Iraq!” By that he meant Iraqi Kurdistan, the temperate, gorgeous, and supremely friendly region in the north that couldn’t be more different from what most probably imagine. Here, snowcapped peaks dive into rivers, green hillsides hide ancient ruins, and it’s nearly impossible to visit a bazaar and not get invited for tea.

Base yourself on the banks of the Great Zab River at the new (from $100), a 37-room boutique hotel about two hours north of the capital, Erbil. From there you can take guided day hikes into the Zagros Mountains and the Barzan nature area, the only preserve in the country; explore Bestoon Cave, to the south, which was once used by Neanderthals; and tube down the Zab. The area is much safer than Mosul, 50 miles to the west, but be prepared to pass through some heavily armed checkpoints, and you’ll want to avoid border towns. can help you organize trips that include hotels, food, transfers, and a guide (from $250 per day). —Tim Neville

Kubu Island, Makgadikgadi, Botswana

The first time you see it, you’ll probably mistake Kubu Island for a mirage. After driving 370 miles north from the capital of Gaborone, or 240 miles south from the Okavango Delta, you’ll hit a seemingly never-ending expanse of salt pans, and then, soon after, a lone ­granite outcropping that’s about 30 feet high and covered with Dalí-style baobab trees. The thrill—and the challenge—of this corner of Botswana’s Sua Pan is its desolation. Yet there’s a lot to do: hiking the fossil-strewn surroundings, off-roading across the pans, and stargazing without a single light to wash out the view.

To get there in the rainy season, from November to March, you’ll need a four-wheel-drive vehicle with off-road navigation. Pack everything—food, water, gas, and camping equipment—and book a campsite under a baobab (from $14) through the , a group comprising members of the nearby Mmatshumo settlement who act as custodians of Kubu and make for expert hiking guides. —S.M.

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Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

Dressel was doing much to stoke the rebellion. A year earlier he’d won six golds and two silvers at the World Championships in Kwangju, South Korea, to match Michael Phelps’s all-time record of eight golds at a single Olympics. When the pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dressel came to Budapest, where during six weeks of racing he broke four world records in seven days. That, plus five more world records set by other swimmers in Hungary, suddenly made the league, not the Games, the place where sports history was being made. That in turn made Dressel and his left-arm sleeve tattoo the icons of an Olympic sport fast evolving beyond the Olympics.

Dressel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had built his entire existence around the Games. “My whole life,” he said, “you hear swimming, you hear track, you hear gymnastics, you think Olympics.” But in the league, he said, he had discovered “what swimming should be.”

Dressel’s dilemma had its roots in an old paradox. In public, the mythology of the Games—the Olympic ideal—makes them the world’s most prestigious tournament. Backstage, however, athletes despise the old men who run them, for their long and dismal history of corruption, and for allowing and even profiting from the financial, sexual, and pharmacological abuse of Olympians. The establishment’s latest ignominy concerned the coronavirus. Last March, epidemiologists said they couldn’t imagine a better superspreader event than gathering together several million people from every country on earth, then dispersing them back across the planet two weeks later. The International Olympic Committee’s response—that it couldn’t imagine the Games any other way—made clear that it valued schedules and bottom lines above global health. After weeks of refusing to back down, it agreed to a only and Australia and Britain threatened to do the same.

But for once, the IOC’s arrogance had cost it. Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking. By arranging COVID-safe bubbles or going virtual, most major competitions in track and field, basketball, soccer, cycling, tennis, and marathon running went ahead, prompting a string of editorials wondering if the Games were even necessary. “Cancel. The. Olympics,” .

Leading the charge was the ISL. It’s not often that someone sets up a new Champions League. But over nine months in 2019, Ukrainian multimillionaire Konstantin Grigorishin did just that. At 55, Grigorishin has a trim physique and a shaved head that suggest a muscular efficiency; in another life as a Soviet cosmologist, he spent his days imagining new galaxies. Grigorishin’s vision of a better world for swimming involved a professional league of city-based teams made up of elite athletes. He argued that waiting four years for a big race didn’t celebrate the sport so much as stifle it, and pointed up another Olympic conundrum: why the world’s most popular participatory sports—running and swimming—were among its more obscure spectator ones. His competition would be in which swimmers faced off in weekly meets. To ensure that it was free of doping, any violation would mean a lifetime ban. Unlike the Olympics, the league would pay its athletes: Grigorishin pledged a 50 percent share of revenues. His big promise to swimmers was that by combining continuous competition with arena-rock production, he would make them stars. The ISL’s first season, in 2019—seven meets between eight teams from the U.S. and Europe, which drew stadium crowds and an online audience of millions—proved that he was onto something. The second season—expanded to ten teams, and staged in a bubble thrown around 300 swimmers, 1,000 support staff, and three adjacent hotels and a natatorium on the river in Budapest—replaced the Olympics as the biggest sporting event of 2020.

Dressel shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s really hard for me to say, ‘Yeah, Budapest is how it’s going to be,’” he said. “I don’t know if it’s up to me. I don’t know what even I wish it to be.” Something in Dressel’s tone suggested that he was less spooked by the idea of Olympic decline than by talking about it out loud. We spoke about other subjects for a while: growing up in a family of swimmers, how he might have been a wide receiver, the beauty and spirituality of water. Then Dressel said: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with any sport. You’ve got to have people run the meets. And, you know, there might be some things that maybe I don’t want to know about.”

Which people? What things?

The post The Plot to Kill the Olympics appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

Dressel was doing much to stoke the rebellion. A year earlier he’d won six golds and two silvers at the World Championships in Kwangju, South Korea, to match Michael Phelps’s all-time record of eight golds at a single Olympics. When the pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dressel came to Budapest, where during six weeks of racing he broke four world records in seven days. That, plus five more world records set by other swimmers in Hungary, suddenly made the league, not the Games, the place where sports history was being made. That in turn made Dressel and his left-arm sleeve tattoo the icons of an Olympic sport fast evolving beyond the Olympics.

Dressel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had built his entire existence around the Games. “My whole life,” he said, “you hear swimming, you hear track, you hear gymnastics, you think Olympics.” But in the league, he said, he had discovered “what swimming should be.”

Dressel’s dilemma had its roots in an old paradox. In public, the mythology of the Games—the Olympic ideal—makes them the world’s most prestigious tournament. Backstage, however, athletes despise the old men who run them, for their long and dismal history of corruption, and for allowing and even profiting from the financial, sexual, and pharmacological abuse of Olympians. The establishment’s latest ignominy concerned the coronavirus. Last March, epidemiologists said they couldn’t imagine a better superspreader event than gathering together several million people from every country on earth, then dispersing them back across the planet two weeks later. The International Olympic Committee’s response—that it couldn’t imagine the Games any other way—made clear that it valued schedules and bottom lines above global health. After weeks of refusing to back down, it agreed to a only and Australia and Britain threatened to do the same.

But for once, the IOC’s arrogance had cost it. Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking. By arranging COVID-safe bubbles or going virtual, most major competitions in track and field, basketball, soccer, cycling, tennis, and marathon running went ahead, prompting a string of editorials wondering if the Games were even necessary. “Cancel. The. Olympics,” .

Leading the charge was the ISL. It’s not often that someone sets up a new Champions League. But over nine months in 2019, Ukrainian multimillionaire Konstantin Grigorishin did just that. At 55, Grigorishin has a trim physique and a shaved head that suggest a muscular efficiency; in another life as a Soviet cosmologist, he spent his days imagining new galaxies. Grigorishin’s vision of a better world for swimming involved a professional league of city-based teams made up of elite athletes. He argued that waiting four years for a big race didn’t celebrate the sport so much as stifle it, and pointed up another Olympic conundrum: why the world’s most popular participatory sports—running and swimming—were among its more obscure spectator ones. His competition would be in which swimmers faced off in weekly meets. To ensure that it was free of doping, any violation would mean a lifetime ban. Unlike the Olympics, the league would pay its athletes: Grigorishin pledged a 50 percent share of revenues. His big promise to swimmers was that by combining continuous competition with arena-rock production, he would make them stars. The ISL’s first season, in 2019—seven meets between eight teams from the U.S. and Europe, which drew stadium crowds and an online audience of millions—proved that he was onto something. The second season—expanded to ten teams, and staged in a bubble thrown around 300 swimmers, 1,000 support staff, and three adjacent hotels and a natatorium on the river in Budapest—replaced the Olympics as the biggest sporting event of 2020.

Dressel shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s really hard for me to say, ‘Yeah, Budapest is how it’s going to be,’” he said. “I don’t know if it’s up to me. I don’t know what even I wish it to be.” Something in Dressel’s tone suggested that he was less spooked by the idea of Olympic decline than by talking about it out loud. We spoke about other subjects for a while: growing up in a family of swimmers, how he might have been a wide receiver, the beauty and spirituality of water. Then Dressel said: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with any sport. You’ve got to have people run the meets. And, you know, there might be some things that maybe I don’t want to know about.”

Which people? What things?

The post The Plot to Kill the Olympics appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I’m heading to the Arctic thinking about death.

Lying facedown in the top bunk of an overnight train inching from Saint Petersburg toward the Russian port city of Murmansk, I have a berth waiting for me on an August expedition sailing north.

I’m working on a book about Arctic explorers, and that means swimming in a sea of sorrow. In my train compartment, dead adventurers haunt me: Faithful sled dogs eaten by humans or swallowed by chasms in the ice. Sailors devoured by polar bears or their own shipmates. Even when no animals or people are stalking them, polar explorers have a tendency to starve or freeze or succumb to disease.

I’ve come to Russia at age 51 to re-create parts of William Barents’s third voyage to the Arctic from 400 years ago. Crossing and recrossing the sea northeast of Scandinavia, Barents, a Dutch navigator, went looking for a passage to China, but he and 16 men were trapped by sea ice during the summer of 1596. For nearly a year, they were stranded hundreds of miles above the mainland on Novaya Zemlya, a pair of large islands extending all the way to 77 degrees north. Five sailors died, including Barents himself, who perished at sea after they abandoned their ship and he and the remaining crew tried to get home on small boats. His quest to find the lucrative route to China was a brave but dismal failure.

Once we leave Murmansk, our boat will sail the same formidable waters. Setting out with a Russian crew aboard a yacht called Alter Ego, I’ll follow in Barents’s wake over the sea that now bears his name.

But Barents isn’t the only thing on my mind. Other grim news is preoccupying me as much or more. Arctic sea ice is collapsing, with few signs of reversal. I’ve been to the far north twice to report on climate change, and in the meantime it’s only gotten worse.

My family seems equally vulnerable. The night before I left home, my cousin Joe messaged me about the trip. As kind a man as I’ve met, and a traumatized veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, he had checked himself in for alcohol rehab earlier that summer at the age of 47. By the time I was packing my bags, he’d been sober for more than a month. On the last day of July, I sent my love and told him to hold down the fort while I was gone.

But I’m wondering if the fort will be standing when I return. Weeks before, my father and stepfather were diagnosed with cancer; my mother is now deep in the throes of paranoid dementia. My two teenage children are fine, but I feel bad about leaving my husband parenting solo for so long while he’s working full-time. Meanwhile, the contract I signed before all this happened says my book is due by Christmas.

I feel both grateful and ashamed to have a chance to go off the grid to focus on research. I’m running from looming family mortality into the arms of historic—and historical—tragedy. Part of me thinks I shouldn’t go. But I know it might be the journey of a lifetime.

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Imagine what would happen if some, but not all, athletes found a way of instantly improving their race times by two or three percent. At the elite levels of sport, where the slimmest of margins can separate fame, glory, and big piles of money from a pat on the back and a free bagel, two or three percent is enormous. That hypothetical scenario, according to a new study, is—or at least was—real.

Wait, you thought I was talking about running shoes? Nah, not this time. I’m talking about systematic, state-sponsored blood doping. The state in question is Russia, which is currently locked in with the World Anti-Doping Agency over manipulated data and hidden positive tests that may see Russia once again excluded from the Olympics (if they happen)Ìęand other major international sports competitions for the next four years. An analysis of Russian female distance runners before and after the implementation of a new anti-doping technique reveals a starkly incriminating pattern, and provides a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how big of a difference doping can make.

To be clear, the new study can’t tell us exactly who was doping, or what they were taking. It relies on an approach called performance profiling, which looks for unexpected patterns in athlete performance. It’s a way of mathematically formulating the sense that something stinks. Back in 2018, for example, I wrote about the case of a 2:20 marathoner who popped a surprise 2:17 at the Frankfurt Marathon, which triggered an algorithm that led to a blood test four days later, and eventually a positive doping finding.

The lead author of that case study was Sergei Iljukov, an anti-doping expert at the University of Helsinki and the Research Institute for Olympic Sports in Finland, working with colleagues including Yorck Schumacher, a pioneer of the performance profiling approach. Now Iljukov and Schumacher have teamed up once again for a retrospective analysis of Russian performances following the introduction of the Athlete Biological Passport in 2012. The ABP is itself an indirect way of detecting doping, since it judges guilt based on suspicious changes in an athlete’s blood values rather than direct detection of a banned substance. For that reason, there has been controversy about how effective it really is. The new paper should help put any remaining doubts to rest.

The design of the study was straightforward. Iljukov and his colleagues looked at the top eight times from the Russian National Championships between 2008 and 2017 in the women’s 800, 1,500, 3,000 steeplechase, 5,000, and 10,000-meters. Anti-doping authorities started collecting longitudinal data to assemble biological passports in 2009, and began formally using the technique and applying sanctions sometime around 2011. Figuring that the deterrent effect of the ABP program started after the first bans were handed out, the researchers divided the results into two categories: 2008 to 2012, and 2013 to 2017.

There are a few different ways you can slice and dice the data, and the researchers also looked at other metrics like the number of athletes caught doping in these events and the number of Russian women hitting the Olympic qualifying standard. But the simplest outcome is the average of those top-eight times before and after the ABP. Here’s what that looks like for each of the five events analyzed:

For four of the five events, there’s a significant slowdown, ranging between 1.9 percent in the 800 and 3.4 percent in the 5,000. The only exception is the steeplechase, which was still a relatively new event for women in 2008, when it made its first appearance at the Olympics. The steeplechase also involves hurdling over barriers, which introduces an additional performance variable beyond pure endurance capacity.

One way of interpreting these findings, Iljukov says, is to conclude that for elite athletes, “a significant amount of blood transfusion could improve running times by 1 to 4 percent, depending on the distance, but on average 2 to 3 percent.” The paper compares this estimate with early studies of blood doping in elite athletes, including some old Soviet studies that don’t show up in the usual PubMed searches, which support the idea of a 1 to 4 percent range of improvement from a transfusion of 750 to 1,200 milliliters of blood.

These days, the ABP program makes it difficult to get away with adding that much blood to your system. Instead, would-be cheaters are limited to microdosing with small amounts of blood. Iljukov guesses that this might still give a one-second edge to an elite 800-meter runner—far from fair, but much better than the previous situation. Of course, this deterrent only works if the athletes in question are being regularly tested to generate sufficient data for a biological passport.

In many respects, these results are anything but surprising: it’s been clear to most observers for a long time that the Russian women were doing something funny. What I always wondered was: where were the Russian men? In the 1980s and early 1990s, when anabolic steroids were the drug category of choice, the usual theory for the middle-distance success of Eastern Bloc women (and relative absence of Eastern Bloc men) was that they responded more strongly to steroids because they started with lower levels of hormones such as testosterone compared to men. But if the problem now is blood doping, what explains the difference?

According to Iljukov, the answer is basically the same. The old Soviet blood doping studies, which include four-decade-old dissertations with titles like “Autohemotransfusion for Enhancing Work Capacity in Athletes,” found that women get a bigger boost from blood transfusions than men. Though the studies don’t directly address why this happens, the key may be baseline levels of total hemoglobin, which tend to be lower in women: “The lower the initial level,” Iljukov hypothesizes, “theÌęmore you can benefit from blood doping.”

Overall, these results seem like cautiously good news. The biological passport program is having a measurable deterrent effect. And performance profiling seems like a promising way of targeting limited testing resources at the most suspicious cases. There’s a catch, though, Iljukov admits. Any system that flags sudden performance jumps of 2 to 3 percent in long-distance races is currently spinning in overdrive thanks to the emergence of carbon-fiber-plated shoes that have led to a rash of out-of-nowhere improvements: “The [resulting] changes, on an individual level, could definitely be defined as abnormal,” Iljukov says. “It is ugly.”

For more Sweat Science, join me on and , sign up for the , and check out my book .

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Maksim Popov needed a gun.Ìę

It was late fall 2018, and the single, unemployed 29-year-old was descending into darkness. He was living in Volgograd, the large industrial city in southwestern Russia where he’d grown up, and as he later explained, he’d become desperate, even hopeless. It’s not clear what caused his downturn or if he’d sought help, but at some point he decided he wanted to shoot himself. To get a firearm legally in Russia , which is presumably why Popov found himself online, reading about a remote outpost in the Arctic that’s popular with Russian tourists and is also one of the easiest places on the planet to rent a gun: Longyearbyen.Ìę

The tiny town of some 2,200 residents is among the northernmost settlements in the world, situated about 800 miles from the North Pole on the island of Spitsbergen, in the isolated Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Nestled at the end of a mountainous valley where it meets the shore of a small fjord, Longyearbyen was for centuries an icy base for whalers and trappers.ÌęBeginning in the early 1900s, it became a lonely coal-mining community populated by Norwegians and Russians, closed to visitors because of the limited infrastructure.

But after the Svalbard airport opened just outside town in 1975, Longyearbyen emerged as a tourist destination, and today some travelers come each year by plane and cruise ship. , with their numbers jumping 500 percent since 2016. Many venture into the frozen wilderness on snowmobiles or dogsled tours. Others visit the most famous structure in the Arctic: . Built inside a mountain, the so-called Doomsday Vault opened in 2008 and stores nearly a million samples of plant seeds, so that crops might be restored following a global catastrophe.Ìę

Then there are the polar bears: at least 2,000 of them live in the region, and the local tourism board likes to claim that they outnumber the residents. A number of outfitters run expedition cruises to observe the animals safely from the water. On the edges of Longyearbyen, warning signs dot the snowy plains: (“All Over Svalbard”), they proclaim below an illustration of a polar bear silhouette. People are required to carry a rifle for protection when leaving town, and tourists frequently walk the streets with guns slung over their shoulders, though they are supposed to be unloaded in town. The grocery store, city hall, bank, and other establishments post no-rifles signs outside and provide lockers in their foyers for storing weapons. If a visitor is at least 18 years old, renting a rifle for protection from bears and the ability to remain sober long enough to visit either of the sporting-goods stores in town that supply firearms.Ìę

For Popov, it seemed like the perfect place to end his life.

There's a classic Norwegian children’s story called “Folk og rovere i Kardemomme By,” which translates as “When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town.” It’s about an idyllic village where the locals live in peace until thieves arrive and cause a bit of trouble, then are arrested and change their ways. (Ultimately, they become heroes when they put out a fire.) Many Longyearbyen residents have felt as though they lived in Cardamom themselves. With its bright, candy-colored homes and buildings laid out neatly against a mountainous backdrop, the town has the look and feel of a Dr. Seuss drawing. As Trond Hellstad, the chipper manager of the local branch of SpareBank 1, the only bank in Longyearbyen, told me one bright day in March, “It’s a fairy-tale town.”

Longyearbyenians share an unusual, adventurous lifestyle. With few roads for cars, they get around on snowmobiles and skis. During the interminable winter, when the sun doesn’t rise for four months, the northern lights frequently paint the starry sky. When daylight returns in the spring, residents celebrate with the weeklong Solfestuka, or Sun Festival, dancing to live music, swilling local beers, and joining the face-painted kids’ chorus to sing “Here Comes the Sun” on the steps of an old burned-out hospital on the outskirts of town. Summer brings endless hours of light for hiking, biking, boating, and fishing. Reindeer and arctic fox roam the island’s interior, while whales, walruses, and seals frolic in the fjord.

Hellstad is a clean-cut, middle-aged dad who favors khakis and pressed button-down shirts. Originally from Nyksund, in northern Norway, he’s among the majority of residents who dropped out of conventional life to chase a far-out existence in Svalbard. There is in the archipelago, but the islands have a surprisingly diverse demographic, with more than 50 nationalities represented, though Norwegians dominate and English is the most commonly shared language. There’s a feeling in Longyearbyen that everyone is running either from or to something. Many who come last only a while, with the average stint running about seven years.

Hellstad fell in love with the natural beauty of Svalbard during a family vacation, and in 2010 he eagerly pursued an opportunity to transfer from a SpareBank 1 in the Vesteralen Islands, off the coast of northern Norway, to manage the branch in Longyearbyen, where he relaxed into the ease of extremely small-town life. He spent his days meeting with locals and tourists in his corner office, a taxidermied arctic fox perched on his wall with a ptarmigan in its jowls. “You can leave your door open here and the key in the car. Everybody knows each other,” he tells me in his lilting Norwegian accent. “There’s almost no crime at all.”

Besides the occasional pub fight or drunken snowmobiler, the most common transgression, according to Longyearbyen police chief inspector Frede Lamo, is stolen boots. Over coffee at a restaurant called Gruvelageret, Lamo explains this oddity. The walls are crowded with old black-and-white photos of miners. Around us, diners dig into dishes of whale carpaccio and reindeer in lingonberry sauce.

Lamo has shaggy blond hair, a graying beard, and tattoos snaking down his arms. Around town, he says, it’s customary to remove your shoes when entering a building. The tradition goes back to the mining heyday of the 1950s, when, according to local legend, a barracks maid named Olga insisted that workers leave their grimy footwear outside. Today most establishments are BYOFS—bring your own fuzzy slippers—which you slide on like Mr. Rogers after politely removing your boots and leaving them in a cubbyhole, where they’re vulnerable to the occasional theft.

Lamo moved to Longyearbyen from Oslo in 2012, after tiring of the traffic and chaos of urban life. A part-time wildlife photographer and guide, he also wanted to live closer to nature. “As soon as you leave town,” he says, “you can be by yourself as long as you want without seeing a single human being.”Ìę

Still, as he learned, you can’t completely escape civilization anymore. After relocating, Lamo spent several months working as a field inspector, a job that had him acting as a kind of environmental-protection cop. He was stationed in an old hunting cabin on the rugged northwest coast of Spitsbergen, tasked with looking out for interactions between cruise ships and wildlife. While there, he witnessed a mysterious and alarming dynamic: human skulls emerging from the rocky ground. Soon he saw other bones—ribs, femurs, hips—along with splintered shards of wood. Because of climate change, the permafrost supporting a whaling graveyard from the 1600s was melting, causing the dead to be expelled.Ìę

The remains that could be gathered were sent to the Svalbard museum, but the macabre dilemma continued in Longyearbyen, where melting permafrost pushed bodies from a town cemetery to the surface. Besides the spook factor, this presented a public-health concern, since corpses can retain deadly pathogens. For this reason, burying the dead has been illegal here since 1950. Locals like to joke that it’s illegal to die in Svalbard. When I meet the town’s scruffy mayor, Arild Olsen, one morning in his office, I ask what the punishment is for violating this law. “Death,” he deadpans.

After some 18 hours of travel, Popov landed at the Svalbard Airport on December 17, 2018. It was the middle of what locals call the dark season, the stretch between late October and mid-February when the sun never rises above the horizon. After stepping off the plane, he would see his first polar bear within minutes: stuffed, it stands on all fours in the center of a baggage-claim carousel. Most travelers who arrive by plane catch a bus for the short ride to town. From his seat, Popov would have seen a faint outline of the mountains lining the valley and probably snowmobilers zipping by with the lights on and rifles in tow, just in case.Ìę

Once in town, he checked into a hotel and spent a couple of days exploring the town, with its one snow-covered road of restaurants and shops. Some locals made their way down the strip on dogsleds, panting huskies pulling them to Fruene, a popular cafĂ©, where they warmed themselves with coffee and ate egg salad sandwiches and lingonberry scones. At night they filled the handful of restaurants and bars to swap stories over beers. Anyone dropping into this scene would be struck by the eclectic mix of characters from many different countries. Longyearbyen has the feel of a postapocalyptic frontier town at the frozen top of the planet.Ìę

But Popov hadn’t come here to explore or to socialize. Eventually, he got down to the business of securing a gun. Across the parking lot from the town grocery—whose offerings include polar bear mugs, polar bear mittens, polar bear booties, and polar bear refrigerator magnets—was a store called Longyear78 Outdoors and Expeditions. For 190 kroner per day ($20), Popov could rent a rifle capable of taking down a charging polar bear.

Before he’d left Volgograd, Popov had filled out an application for a rifle-rental permit, using a Svalbard government website. He’d been approved, and now, inside Longyear78, he handed over his ID and listened as the clerk gave him a detailed explanation of how to operate the weapon. After that, he was free to walk out the door with it slung over his shoulder, like everyone else in town.

Once Popov held the gun in his hand, the reality of his plan hit him. He had come thousands of miles to kill himself. He had a rifle. The time had come, but he was losing his nerve. So he put it off.Ìę

That night, back in his hotel room, he mulled over his options. There was no sun, and he was far from home, in a very strange place. He was sure he didn’t want to go back to Russia, but he didn’t want to die, either. As he would later claim, a new solution dawned on him: he would do something that would allow him to get help, right here in Norway. He eyed his rifle, already loaded, and thought about the lone bank in town. Then he sat down at the laptop he’d brought, typed the phrase “Eto ogrableniye” into a Russian translator, and hit enter. Almost instantly, the English wording appeared: “This is a robbery.”

A couple of years before Popov came to Longyearbyen, Mark Sabbatini was getting ready for bed in his apartment in town when he heard what sounded like a gunshot. Scruffy and thin, with silver-framed glasses and an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, Sabbatini is the one-man publisher-writer-­editor of , the northernmost alternative weekly in the world. Sabbatini grew up in Colorado and says he came to Longyearbyen because he wanted to cover the news at the end of the earth. “It’s isolated in pretty much every possible sense,” he tells me one afternoon at Fruene, “other than the fact that we’ve got a great internet connection.”

The sound he heard in his apartment was his mirror cracking. As soon as he saw the broken glass, he knew that melting ice was destabilizing the ground under buildings. Over the coming days, his floor buckled, windows wouldn’t shut, cracks began scarring the apartment’s edifice. According to commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency and released last winter, Svalbard is among the fastest-warming places on earth, with annual temperatures rising more than seven degrees between 1971 and 2017. Most structures in Longyearbyen are mounted on permafrost, which is a far easier and cheaper solution than digging potentially hundreds of feet down to anchor the foundation in bedrock. As a result, melting has put many buildings at risk. “Everything that is not bolted to the solid ground is moving,” Mayor Olsen says. “Houses, roads, critical infrastructure—everything.”Ìę

Higher temperatures have also brought more rain and floods. In , unusually heavy downpours caused water to leak into the entryway tunnel of the Global Seed Vault, spurring a brief media panic. (As it turned out, the seeds were never at risk.) Rain can also destabilize the snowpack in the mountains bordering town. In December 2015, , a nearby peak, buried 11 homes. Lamo and others rushed to the scene with shovels and dug out their neighbors, though a 42-year-old man and 2-year-old girl died. , in 2017, destroyed two apartment buildings and forced the evacuation of 75 residents. The city subsequently spent $15 million erecting snow fences to protect the most vulnerable structures. Meanwhile, some 140 homes have had to be permanently evacuated due to the danger.

The Norwegian Environment Agency report predicts more of the same, with annual temperatures predicted to rise as much as 18 degrees by 2100 and rainfall increasing by up to 65 percent. Besides transforming how humans live in Svalbard, the changes will have devastating effects on wildlife. One afternoon during my visit in March, Kim Holmen, the international director of the , takes me out for a snowmobile tour to show me changes in the local habitat. A native of Sweden, he has a long gray beard and wears dark sunglasses and a pink knit hat given to him by a former student. He also carries a rifle over his shoulder, in case we encounter any bears.

We stop at the edge of the fjord, which is devoid of ice. “At this time of year, we would have been on a snowmobile belting across to the other side, but now it’s just open water,” he says. In the seas surrounding Svalbard, historically important species like polar cod and ringed seals are moving north as the waters warm, while mackerel and blue whales are making their way in.Ìę

After proceeding for half an hour across soft, silent snow into a vast white valley, we see two reindeer. We watch as they struggle to find food. Rainfall has caused a layer of ice to form between the snow and the underlying grass, so the reindeer must punch through the ice to get at the vegetation. “It’s just single leaves that they might find,” Holman says. “It’s hard work.”Ìę

Changing climate has made life harder all around. Sabbatini had to move out of his teetering apartment. As a journalist, he’s covered the many ways that Svalbard is transforming, and he fielded media calls when the Global Seed Vault leak became an international news story. He never expected another event to steal the spotlight.Ìę

On December 21 at just before 9 A.M., Hellstad trudged happily over the crunchy snow to the one-story building, hanging with icicles, that houses the Longyearbyen post office and SpareBank 1. He greeted his two-person staff, then sat at the desk in his corner office to enjoy the steam rising from his coffee.

At 10:40 A.M., teller Kristine Myrbostad, an outdoorsy young mother, was standing behind the counter in the lobby when a large, dark-haired man came in carrying a rifle. There were no other customers in the bank, and Popov aimed the rifle at her, speaking the English phrases he’d learned online. “This is not a joke,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.”

Terrified, Myrbostad walked with Popov to Hellstad’s office. At first, Hellstad didn’t realize what was going on. He assumed Popov had simply missed the sign telling visitors not to bring guns into the building. “You need to leave the bank,” Hellstad said. “You’re not allowed to have a weapon in here.”

Popov, bundled in layers of wool and down, eyed him solemnly, sweat dripping down his forehead. The Russian aimed his rifle at Hellstad, who felt the shock of fear. Popov repeated his earlier warning: “This is not a joke. This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.”

Hellstad tried to get Popov to understand his circumstances: he was in the middle of nowhere, in frozen darkness, in an outpost with one small airport. A single phone call could close the entire town, so there was no chance of getting away. “This is not a good idea for you,” Hellstad said.Ìę

Popov repeated the other English words he’d practiced. “I need money,” he said. “You have to give me money.”

Hellstad called out to his other employee, Svenn Are Johansen, who was working in the back of the bank, and told him to do what Popov said. Johansen nervously grabbed a stack of multicolored kroner, worth about $8,000, and put it on a table in the lobby. Popov stuffed the pockets of his winter coat, then walked out into the pitch-black day. This was not a fairy tale. A robber had come to Longyearbyen for real.Ìę

When officer Frede Lamo was first told about the robbery at SpareBank 1, which was down the hill from the police department, he figured it was a mistake. “It’s not something we’re used to here at all,” he says. After learning that it had really happened, he mentally sped through the protocol of what he should do. The officers would need weapons and a plan for surrounding the bank. It’s a small town­—where will people be at this time? Lamo recalls thinking. What if they run into this man? A call was made to the nearby grade school to keep the children indoors.

Roughly 15 minutes after Popov had first entered the bank, Lamo and four other officers pulled up in police cars. They didn’t see a robber. Of course, the criminal couldn’t have gone far. Even if he had a vehicle, the road through Longyearbyen doesn’t afford much of an escape. A few miles in one direction and it ends at the airport; a few miles in the other and it stops at a tree. As Lamo looked around in the midday darkness, he figured there was only one thing to do if you’re running from the law in the northernmost town in the world: jump on a snowmobile and ride into the wild.

Except Popov wanted to be caught. After leaving SpareBank, he was eager to get rid of his gun. He didn’t want the gun. He wanted help. He walked across the parking lot and back to Longyear78, rifle in hand, where the clerk reprimanded him for carrying a loaded weapon around town before taking it back.

Panicked, Popov needed to hear a familiar voice. He called his mother in Volgograd and told her he’d just committed a robbery. “She advised me to run, but I told my mom that I was on a desert island,” Popov would say months later at his criminal trial, according to a reporter. Instead he walked back to the bank. He would claim in court that he intended to return the cash.

Lamo and the other cops had just arrived when Popov approached the building. He didn’t have a gun, just the kroner stuffed in his coat pockets. From behind the bank’s locked doors, Hellstad watched as Lamo and the others ordered the Russian to the ground and cuffed him.

On May 8, 2019, a district court in mainland Norway convicted Popov on counts of gross threats, coercive force, and illegal use of arms. He was ordered to pay 20,000 kroner, about $2,300, each to Hellstad and the two other employees of SpareBank 1, and sentenced to one year and two months in a prison in Tromsö. When Popov is released, he will be expelled from Norway.Ìę

“He was quite remorseful,” says Hellstad, who watched the sentencing on a livestream. “He didn’t want to hurt anybody. I’m happy this case is behind us.”

But the aftershocks remain. “I never thought I’d see the day when this happened here,” Sabbatini says. “I mean, what was he thinking?” Coinciding with the robbery, Sabbatini says, there’s been a broader uptick in crime. One acquaintance had fuel canisters swiped from his yard; another had an engagement ring lifted from a locker. Sabbatini no longer leaves his laptop unattended at Fruene. “People have started locking their cars and their homes,” he laments.Ìę

Toward the end of my visit, I snowmobile with Holmen to the top of Longyearbreen glacier, a sweeping slope of ice cutting through the valley outside town. The wind whips up a whiteout as we climb the snow-covered surface, but when we reach the top it clears, affording us a stunning view of the multicolored homes far below and the churning fjord in the distance. Holmen tells me that the glacier, which is thousands of years old, is melting at roughly one foot per year. Looking down at Longyearbyen, it’s impossible not to imagine a very different life here in the near future. It may still be a beacon for people seeking to get away from it all, but it’s going to change. It already has.Ìę

For Hellstad and others, the robbery feels like a menacing omen—a sign that this version of the fairy tale might not have a happy ending. “It’s like the big cruel world is coming to town,” he says. “Like the story of Cardamom, this place where nobody is doing any harm—but that is now kind of broken.”

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In The Russian Odyssey, from filmmaker , skiers Jordy Norris and Ben Osborne chase elusive quality snow inÌęa variety of Russian landscapes, like the Caucasus range and the former Olympic host city of Sochi.

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It is with a heavy heart that I write to inform you that the 2019 North Pole season has been cancelled by the team that operates Barneo, the temporary ice camp near the North Pole run by Russian and Swiss private interests. The camp servesÌęexplorers and others going to the Pole. After suffering through nearly 10 days of delays due to political wrangling for planes between Russia andÌęUkraine, the final straw was that the backup plan to bring in a Canadian planeÌęto take travelers to the ice camp failed as well.Ìę

Ukrainian planes were scheduled to bring adventurers to the camp, but Russian officials banned the planes from landing there. that Ukrainian officials would not let their planes fly to Barneo.

Poor relations between Russia and Ukraine stem from the former country’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in the eastern Ukraine. That translates to players in both governments who don't want to see any collaboration to operate and maintain Barneo.

Complicating this year's saga was aÌęRussian news story touting that country'sÌęoperation of the Barneo ice campÌęthat made its way to Ukraine inflaming the already tense relationship.ÌęSome of the Russians I talked with who facilitate much of the Barneo operation say that this news piece is broadcast every year as propaganda. Ukrainian officials viewed that news storyÌęas Putin trying to claim the Arctic for Russia.Ìę

Until 2018,ÌęBarneo was owned by a Russain named Alexander Orlov who was connected to the current Russian government. Last summer, the ice base was purchased by a Swiss company owned by Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish billionaire.

Once travelers could no longer count onÌęUkrainian flights, a Basler (DC-3) was contracted from the Canadian company Kenn Borek. But the window for flying in and out of Barneo is a short one because the ice melts and breaks up, making it impossible for planes to land and takeoff. The Canadian plane arrived inÌęLongyearbyen, inÌęNorway's Svalbard archipelago, last Friday, but by that time the weather was too unstable to guarantee that visitors could be taken to the ice camp and flown out safely. Canceling trips to North Pole wasÌęa perfectly logical decision. It was also a relief, endingÌęan extendedÌęperiod of uncertainty.Ìę

There is no question that this has been a frustrating process for everyone involved. Worse, this is a situation where everyone loses. Skiers, guides, and the Barneo team, each of us invested a substantial amount of time, energy,Ìęand expense that will not be easily recovered.

The Arctic OceanÌęis untamed wilderness—one of the last great frontiers left on planet Earth. No matter how much we try to wrangle it into compliance for a few weeks every spring to make the trek to the North Pole, the sea ice has the final say. However, I fear that the opportunity for this particular adventureÌęwill not last; the clock is running out on the ice. That, more than the cancellation of this season, makes me sad.Ìę

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As if the ongoing impasse over the federal budget weren’t depressing enough, the world of endurance sports kicked off 2019 with a self-inflicted crisis of its own. Once again, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for allowing itself to be played by Russia—the country behind the great urine switcheroo of 2014. WADA certainly shouldn’t be immune to criticism, but it’s worth remembering that the agency has far less influence than the athletic institutions that it is meant to serve. First and foremost, we should be holding the International Olympic Committee (IOC) accountable.Ìę

Before we get to that, here’s an update on what has so far been an eventful year in doping news.

In September, WADA made the controversial decision to reinstate Russia’s national drug-testing body, which had been suspended since 2015 in the wake of revelations about the country’s . Russia’s reinstatement, which was heavily criticized at the time by USADA President Travis Tygart and others, came with the stipulation that WADA be granted access to a laboratory in Moscow so that the agency could obtain further evidence for pending investigations. WADA’s hard deadline for obtaining data from the Moscow lab was set for December 31, 2018. I’ll spare you the suspense. , the team they sent to Moscow was rebuffed because their equipment apparently wasn’t certified under Russian law. The deadline came and went, eliciting widespread ridicule of WADA President Craig Reedie. ÌęÌę

“I can’t believe that former 1960s badminton starlet Craig Reedie has had his arse handed to him yet again by former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin,” Guardian columnist Marina Hyde last week.Ìę

In response, WADA’s founding president Richard Pound published an in which he claimed that the “lynch mobs” attacking the agency were doing more harm than good.Ìę

“Efforts to discredit and destroy WADA will not help the fight against doping in sport and the protection of clean athletes, despite the athlete-centered rhetoric,” Pound wrote, adding that, at the end of the day, we’d be far worse off if WADA ceased to exist.Ìę

As for the snafu of the mysteriously inaccessible Moscow laboratory, on Monday WADA that the issue had been “resolved” and that another team would be headed to the Russian capital later this week. Assuming that things work out this time, the fact that the initial deadline was missed by a few days shouldn’t be all too consequential in and of itself. Of course, given all that’s transpired, one doesn’t need to be a hardened cynic to be skeptical about any data WADA does manage to obtain.Ìę

But what, really, is the alternative for WADA in the case? Even if the agency were to declare Russia noncompliant and re-suspend the country, that wouldn’t guarantee any action from the organizations who actually call the shots. It shouldn’t be WADA’s main duty to mete out punishment, especially if more powerful governing bodies don’t follow up.

Which brings us to the IOC.Ìę

On January 1, IOC President Thomas Bach published a “.” After modestly taking credit for the burgeoning peace between North and South Korea, he proceeded to tout the IOC’s tough sanctioning of Russia at last year’s Winter Olympics and declared that Russia had atoned for its doping sins. As a reminder, despite officially suspending the Russian Federation (a suspension that has since been lifted), the IOC nevertheless allowed 160 Russian athletes to compete in Pyeongchang, , among others.

Unsurprisingly, Bach’s announcement didn’t sit well with everyone, not least because it came out the day after Russia missed WADA’s “hard deadline.”Ìę

“Bach is sending a clear message that he will back Russia no matter what, no matter the rule violations, compliance be damned,” USADA General Counsel Bill Bock on January 1.Ìę

“If he were in the U.S., Mueller would be investigating. A more definitive statement of utter capitulation and feckless weakness cannot be imagined,” he added.

To be sure, Bock has also been an , arguing that the organization has been far too lenient in the face of Russian non-cooperation. (It’s worth mentioning that, as a second requirement for reinstatement, that Russia “publicly accept” that state-sponsored doping did take place. Shockingly, this has not happened.)

However, in the age of micro-dosing andÌę, we need some iteration of WADA to exist. If we’re going to have anti-doping rules there has to be some means of enforcing them on an international scale. On the other hand, when it comes down to it, we don’t strictly need the Olympics in order to have elite-level international athletic competition.Ìę

I know what you’re thinking. As someone who spends a lot of time writing about professional distance running, I’m as aware as anyone that the Olympics are the only time non-enthusiasts tend to notice the sport. If you’re a pro runner—or, for that matter, a pro skier, or swimmer, or curler!—there’s no bigger stage. What’s more, if you’re an elite athlete in an “Olympic sport,” chances are that the significance of the Games is so embedded in your psyche that you can’t imagine competing without the five-ring dream beckoning in the distance; witness the and the many more who say that making an Olympic team would be the greatest triumph of their career.

And I totally get it. I’m in no danger of becoming an Olympian and yet ever since childhood, I’ve been indoctrinated by the pageantry of it all: the torch relays, the theme songs, the medal presentations, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Bob Costas’s immutable face…Ìę

But we shouldn’t let our sentimental ideas about what has evolved into a multi-billion dollar marketing operation lead us to believe that the Olympics must, as a rule, always represent the pinnacle of athletic achievement. If the Olympics don’t give a shit about clean athletes, perhaps clean athletes should return the favor.Ìę

“When we will hit that critical mass where more athletes look at the Olympics with disdain than with esteem is an open question,” Jules Boykoff, noted Olympics critic and author of ,Ìęput it to me in an email. “But there’s no question that these days, for clean athletes, serious grievances churn beneath the shimmery surface of the Games.”Ìę

Of course, turning such grievances into meaningful action is a tall order. For most, the Games are still an opportunity that is too seductive (and lucrative) to pass up. For now, the only ones who we might expect to protest are those who can afford to do so.Ìę

“I think if some big-name athletes took a stand against the IOC and said they’d withhold participation unless things improved, that could make a dent,” Boykoff wrote in his email.Ìę

“More than likely, that would come from an Olympian coming toward the end of their career, or one who has solidified so many sponsorship deals outside the Olympics that they would be insulated from the decision not to participate, let alone any threats the IOC might try to level.”

Prospective host cities have increasingly been giving the Games a hard pass. What if athletes starting doing the same?

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It’s been a rough couple of years for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the worldwide governing body for track and field. Just ask Lamine Diack. The former IAAF president, who served from 1999 until 2015, on charges of corruption and money laundering. Further embarrassment came with the 2016 , which the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) commissioned in response to the prevalence of “state-sponsored” doping in Russia. The report found that high-ranking IAAF officials had known about such activities for a long time, and had failed to act.

“It was apparent to the commission that the institutional knowledge of the problems with Russia was far wider than has been acknowledged, and that the IAAF had displayed no genuine appetite to deal with the problems,” former WADA president Richard Pound .Ìę

Last week, however, it was WADA itself that was criticized for dropping the ball in the fight against doping.Ìę

In a decision that sparked widespread consternation, the world’s chief anti-doping organization Russia’s national drug-testing agency, ending a three-year suspension. In effect, the country accused of orchestrating one of the most in sports history was being given the green light to once again run its own doping prevention program. That RUSADA’s suspension was lifted after only three years was galling enoughÌę(individual athletes often serve suspensions of four years for doping violations), but it was made worse by the fact that Russia hadn’t officially acknowledged the findings of the McLaren Report, which was a key initial criterion for reinstatement.Ìę

Travis Tygart, the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, put it bluntly when : “WADA has sent one clear message to the world: we put the wishes of a small handful of sports administrators above the rights of millions of clean athletes and the dreams of billions of sports fans.”

It probably didn’t help that the WADA board made its decision during a meeting in the Seychelles, which gave the whole thing an air of out-of-touch extravagance. (Fighting the scourge of doping is tough, dirty work, so it only makes sense that one would need to rinse off in the Indian Ocean when it all gets to be too much.) Not that all WADA bigwigs thought that readmitting RUSADA was a swell idea. Cross-country skiing gold medalist Beckie Scott resigned from the WADA compliance review committee following the decision.

So what does the world’s premier drug testing organization have to say for itself?

On Monday, in responding to the backlash following its Russia decision, WADA’s president Sir Craig Reedie argued that RUSADA had acted in compliance with the majority of the criteria that WADA had initially set out. In fact, according to Reedie, aside from acknowledging the McLaren report, the only thing left outstanding was for Russia to grant WADA officials access to a Moscow laboratory that held testing samples of several Russian athletes who are still being investigated. Access to the Moscow lab is to be granted no later than the end of December, otherwise RUSADA’s reinstatement is a no-go. Reedie appears to be suggesting that WADA is playing hardball after all.

Given the sophistication of the Russian doping operation during the Sochi Olympics, which involved swapping out urine samples by , one wonders how trustworthy any data found in a Moscow lab is going to be.Ìę

But to dwell on that would be to miss a more significant point. In fairness to Reedie, his open letter stresses that WADA’s principal responsibility vis-à-vis Russia is to help develop a “robust” national anti-doping agency, but not to decide which international sporting events Russia gets to participate in.

As Reedie puts it:

“WADA has no powers to determine entries to sporting competitions, nor to apply sanctions to the doped. This is the responsibility of event organizers, international sports federations and national anti-doping organizations. If Russian athletes have been present in all sports and at every possible competition since 2016’s findings, with the honorable exceptions of athletics and Parasport, then that is the responsibility of those who govern the sports and events in question.”

Perhaps I’m reading into this a little too much, but Reedie seems to be intimating that it’s the International Olympic Committee’s own damn fault for allowing Russia to compete at the 2016 and 2018 Games, despite the country’s extensive doping violations. (It’s true that the roughly 170 Russians who competed earlier this year in Pyeongchang had to do so under a neutral flag as “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” but this felt less like a punishment and more like——a joke.) The statement is all the more remarkable when one considers that the IOC is of the WADA organization. Perhaps the words “independent agency” still mean something after all.

Reedie’s letter also includes a subtle compliment to the IAAF. Did you catch it? “The honorable exception of athletics.” Indeed, for all the controversy that it has incited recently, it often gets overlooked that the IAAF was one of the few governing bodies to heed the WADA recommendation in advance of the Rio Games that the Russian Federation shouldn’t be allowed to take part. In Rio, the IOC caved, but the IAAF did not. They should get credit for that.

What will the IAAF do now? The organization is adamant that, of RUSADA’s reinstatement, this doesn’t automatically mean that Russian track and field (RusAF) will be allowed back into the club. (It’s worth noting that on September 19, the IAAF Athletes’ Commission sent to WADA urging that RUSADA not be reinstated.) The IAAF has its own Russian task force, was still of the opinion that RusAF should remain suspended, despite making “significant progress” in revamping the Russian anti-doping infrastructure. (RusAF has, for example, allegedly taken steps to make it easier for regional members to suspend coaches who violated anti-doping rules.) Meanwhile, RusAF this week (CAS) to force the IAAF to overturn its suspension. RusAF is arguing that because WADA, which had “essentially identical” criteria for Russian reinstatement as the IAAF, agreed to soften its stance, it is incumbent on the IAAF to do the same. So far, it seems the IAAF doesn’t feel the same way.ÌęThe IAAF Council is scheduled to meet again in December, at which point they will update their position.

On the one hand, it would be reductive to say that the only way the IAAF can preserve its credibility is to uphold its Russia suspension in December. To take this position would be to deny RusAF a chance at reform. However, it wouldn’t be a good look if the IAAF followed WADA’s example and allowed to RusAF to entirely ignore the McLaren Report. For both WADA and IAAF this acknowledgement has been a line in the sand from the very beginning. Last week, WADA disgraced itself by moving the goalposts. The IAAF now has the chance to take a firmer stand. Let’s hope they use it.Ìę

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