Marc Kennedy's curling stone crosses the hog line on February 21st in Milan, or maybe it doesn't. Oskar Eriksson says it did. The internet burns for a week. Canada keeps the gold. Great Britain takes home its second silver since 2022. And exactly 0 changes to the touching rule follow, because the IOC's job was already done the moment that gold medal went around somebody's neck.
That's the whole story, repeated forever. Scandal arrives, noise builds, the offended party files something with somebody, and then the calendar turns. The 2026 Milan Games produced what the March 18th retrospectives called "epic highs and lows," and the lows included the curling controversy and Norway's Sturla Holm Laegreid announcing his infidelity at the bronze medal podium instead of talking about biathlon. Different categories of human failing, same institutional response: a shrug dressed up as due process.
The Machine Is Working Exactly as Designed
People keep expecting the IOC and WADA to reform after scandals because they assume those organizations exist to protect clean competition. They do not. They exist to protect the event. The Games must go on, sponsors must be satisfied, broadcast deals must hold, and host cities must deliver their opening ceremonies without asterisks. Reform threatens all of that. Continuity guarantees it.
Consider WADA right now. The United States owes $7.3 million in unpaid dues from 2024-2025, a dispute rooted in how WADA handled Chinese swimmers at the Paris Olympics. WADA's response is a proposed ban on US officials from the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 LA Olympics. Rahul Gupta, the White House drug policy director, called it "unrealistic." WADA's own spokesperson James Fitzgerald acknowledged the rule "may not affect upcoming events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup or 2028 LA Olympics." So the punishment for non-compliance is a punishment that probably won't apply. That's not enforcement. That's theater with a press release attached.
You can go back to 2022 and find the same pattern in chess, where Magnus Carlsen accused Hans Niemann of cheating and the arbiter Chris Bird said he found no evidence of it in any game he oversaw. A Netflix documentary resurfaced the whole mess in early 2026. Still no systemic rule changes in competitive chess either. The scandal cycle feeds on itself because it never has to resolve. The story is the story. The resolution is optional.
The Accusation Is Enough, and That's the Problem
Jax Moreno would probably argue that without ironclad evidence, you can't change rules based on accusations alone, and on that narrow point he's right. But the lack of evidence is precisely why the rules need to change: better technology, mandatory review protocols, standardized officiating in curling, transparent testing chains in biathlon. The accusation shouldn't be the end of the conversation. It should be the beginning of a structural fix.
What the IOC actually fears is the precedent of accountability. If you retroactively disqualify Canada on a touch dispute, you open every future final to the same scrutiny. If you strip WADA of its authority over Chinese swimmers because the US says so, you hollow out the anti-doping framework entirely. So instead they calculate the cost of the scandal against the cost of reform, and reform almost always loses, because reform is expensive and scandals are temporary.
The athletes know this. Every clean competitor who watches a rival get a suspicious reprieve knows the game being played above their heads. Marc Kennedy kept his gold. Sturla Holm Laegreid kept his bronze. WADA kept its budget shortfall. And the 2028 Los Angeles Games will open on schedule, clean as a whistle, at least officially.
