Everything you need to know about the World Anti-Doping Association can be found in the first eight sentences of a report in the​New York Times ​today.​

"In December 2012, the World Anti-Doping Agency received an email from an Olympic athlete from Russia. She was asking for help.

The athlete, a discus thrower named Darya Pishchalnikova, had won a silver medal four months earlier at the London Olympics. She said that she had taken banned drugs at the direction of Russian sports and antidoping authorities and that she had information on systematic doping in her country. Please investigate, she implored the agency in the email, which was written in English.

“I want to cooperate with WADA,” the email said.

But WADA, the global regulator of doping in Olympic sports, did not begin an inquiry, though a staff lawyer circulated the message to three top officials, calling the accusations “relatively precise,” including names and facts. Instead, the agency did something that seemed antithetical to its mission to protect clean athletes. It sent Ms. Pishchalnikova’s email to Russian sports officials — the very people who she said were running the doping program."

An admitted cheater was offering to expose massive, systemic cheating. Instead of pursuing the leads they were given, the association tasked with stopping rampant doping in sport instead passed the information to the officials allegedly in charge of the program designed to circumvent the rules.

​A few more highlights from the NYT story:

-Vitaly Stepanov (one of the whistleblowers who helped kick off this entire scandal) wrote 200 emails to WADA detailing Russian doping efforts. These emails only returned a perfunctory "Message received" notification.

-Current WADA president Craig Reedie said ​to the New York Times: “We’re not going to turn to people and say, ‘these are the rules; obey them.'"

-Reedie wrote the Russian track federation in 2015, saying "there is no action being taken by WADA that is critical of the efforts that I know have been made, or are being made, to improve anti-doping efforts in Russia."

There is much more to the report. You should read it it in its entirety.

But here are the two major takeaways from the story: 

1. When confronted with direct evidence of doping, WADA handed the evidence over to the sponsors of the doping program.

2. There is seemingly no such thing as an anti-doping movement in sports. There is only a branding crusade to make sports more palatable to sponsors. As former WADA spokesman Robert Weiner blatantly admitted in the ​Times ​report, WADA's founding in 1999 happened because "they were afraid sponsor money would dry up if the Olympics were perceived as dirty."​