Ryan Cochrane: Swimming's Captain Canada who still believes

Ryan Cochrane calls it a “precarious balance” - the full-time commitments that come with training for Olympic sport, while entrusting others with the power to keep it all on the up and up. But oh, there are weeks like this one where it seems dreadfully out of whack, and years of experience that indicate it could ever be so.

Still, he believes - even, and especially, when doping control knocks at his door in Victoria. Like late last week, as he readied to come to Swim Canada’s final pre-Olympic staging in Toronto.

“I’ve been tested twice a day, four times in a week,” Cochrane said Monday, on the deck of the Pan Am Sports Centre. “It’s constant in Canada. We do our due diligence to make sure our athletes are clean.

“I don’t think that’s the case in every country. As an athlete you just wish it was even across the board - that every country was doing what they could to instil that kind of attitude among their athletes - but it’s not.”

It probably never will be, but as long as the divide between clean and drugged remains drawn, at least it’s been confirmed (again) where the International Olympic Commission stands - that's them, inching out the door for their Rio penthouse suites, leaving it to others. In kicking back to sports federations the decision whether to ban Russia from these upcoming Summer Games for a state-sponsored doping program, the IOC declared itself disinterested and irrelevant to the issue, cueing a bureaucratic sprint within each of the Games’ sports bodies to identify and vet a team of “clean” athletes from Russia (seven swimmers were crossed off the list Monday). There is leave to appeal for anyone upset they’ve been ruled out, and the door to a possible legal challenge is wide open, so hang on to your Olympic rings, it's not done yet.

A medalist in London, this is Cochrane’s third Games, so he knows something about the forking of the road between Olympian ideals and the IOC's well-practised reality. Along with co-captain Martha McCabe, he’s taken over the retired Brent Hayden’s leadership mantle on a Canadian team loaded with fresh faces, many of them full of potential, many of them teenaged and unschooled in the finer points - including competing to the maximum while fully understanding that there’s a chance somebody on the starting blocks opposite you is PED’d up to the gills.And still, he believes.

“A lot of my competitors have had doping violations - quite a few of them. It’s frustrating,” he said. “I really don’t know what the right answer is. I don’t think it’s fair to that an entire country can’t go, because there are clean athletes in Russia. I can’t imagine being a clean athlete who does everything possible to stay on the right, and not being able to go to the Olympics because of other people’s faults. But that said, the narrative of doping in the last year or two has been … frustrating.

“As an athlete you do everything you can to stay clean and race against the best in the world,” says Cochrane. “The upside for me is that even if my competitors are doping, or even if they’re not, I feel competitive still, I feel like I have a chance of beating them. That’s a really good place to be mentally.”

It sure is. Might be the only good place in this whole dodgy story, actually.