John Oliver prepares for the Rio Olympics with a hard, jaundiced look at doping

John Oliver tackles doping in professional athletics

(Image credit: Last Week Tonight)

last updated 27 June 2016

In the lead-up to the Rio Olympics, expect a lot of glowing "inspiration porn" about the athletes going for the gold, John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. "But while the Olympics feature thrilling displays of athletic prowess, they can also take place beneath the dark shadow caused by doping scandals. And this Olympics is no exception." Russia has the most colorful scandal, so Oliver started there. But while "Russia's track and field team is currently banned from competing at the upcoming Olympics," he said, "there's nothing new about this story. For as long as there's been science, people have used it to juice the human body."

Still, the prevalence of doping today is surprising, Oliver said, given the robust anti-doping measures taken by major sports federations. "Despite rigorous testing, athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks, for multiple reasons," he explained. "For a start, there are multiple tests, and none of them can detect the full range of drugs an athlete may be on." Oliver ran through some of the ways athletes cheat the system, and more entertainingly, some of the excuses they've used when they test positive. And they do it, he added, in part because "there is a massive financial ecosystem dependent on spectacular athletic achievement in scandal-free games."

Oliver returned to Russia, using its scandal to diagram the global anti-doping system and how they can break down. "While this clearly isn't the system we need, it might actually be the system we want," he added, with an assist from the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Russia isn't alone, either, he said. "Think of doping like Vladimir Putin: It's far from just a Russian problem, it's something that adversely affects the entire world." The answer is not to just give up and allow doping, but the world has two choices going forward, Oliver said: "If we truly want to clean up sports, we should empower WADA by making it truly independent, and put pressure on the broader sport system to aggressively combat doping. And if we don't really care enough to make changes, we should at the very least make our syrupy athlete promos a bit more honest." If you've ever watched Last Week Tonight, you know what comes next. Watch below (with requisite NSFW warning). Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.