The use of banned drugs is rife in sport

SKIERS, skaters, ice hockey players and other snow-loving athletes have travelled to Pyeongchang for this year’s Winter Olympics to vie for supremacy. But the South Korean city is also the venue for another contest—one between the bodies responsible for anti-doping rules.

Last year, after tip-offs and suspicious test results in previous events, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned 43 Russian athletes from future Olympic competitions, stripping ten of them of medals they had won in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. In December, after an investigation into drug-screening records leaked by the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, it accused Russia of state-sponsored doping. It barred the country from competing in Pyeongchang, condemning the “systematic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system”.

That conspiracy’s existence could hardly have come as a surprise to the IOC. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), set up in 1999 to standardise rules across...