Russian inquiry finds cheating went beyond Sochi Olympics
Russia’s ministry of sport, headed by Vitaly Mutko, is accused by Wada of “orchestrated systematic cheating of Russian athletes to subvert the doping control process”.
The report says Russia’s doping programme started in late 2011, and was in place for the London Olympics in 2012 and the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach called the Russian practices a “shocking and unprecedented attack” on sport, saying that the IOC would not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organization implicated. Calling this the “disappearing positive methodology”, it involved marking positive tests collected in Moscow either with the words “Quarantine” or “Save”.
This investigation was set up in May following an interview in the New York Times with the former director of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, in which he described an elaborate plan to ensure Russian success at Sochi 2014. That program involved dark-of-night switching of dirty samples with clean ones; it prevented Russian athletes from testing positive.
New Zealand has long supported worldwide calls for WADA to investigate serious allegations against nations who have failed to honestly implement the World Anti-Doping Code, but Mr Steel says there must also be consequences where serious wrongdoing is exposed. The withheld positives spanned 28 sports, including track and field, wrestling, swimming, snowboarding, and even table tennis. If all the operational precautions to promote and permit doping by Russian athletes proved to have been ineffective for whatever reason, the laboratory provided a fail-safe mechanism.
McLaren said the report was “credible and verifiable” and called Rodchenkov “was a credible and truthful person”.
Putin went on to say that those names as “direct perpetrators” in the report would be temporarily suspended until the investigation is over.
WADA alleges widespread, organized Russian corruption in the training of its Olympics athletes.
The 97-page McLaren report is the result of a two-month investigation.
“I have unwavering confidence in the report”, he said.
WADA president Craig Reedie said Russian Federation must sack government officials implicated in the doping scheme before its athletes should be considered to compete against other global athletes.
It said that Moscow had concealed hundreds of positive doping cases from a variety of sports, including soccer, in the run-up to the games.
“In an ideal world, we would’ve done a great deal more work with the data, ‘” McLaren said. He did not include a recommendation for punishment in the report and urged the International Olympic Committee and others to absorb the information and act upon it as they wish.
In all, 580 positive tests are alleged to have been covered up across 30 different sports – a revelation USA anti-doping boss Travis Tygart termed a “mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government”.