Drug-test lab serves cocktails
The bartender at the restaurant here flipped a liquor bottle stylishly around his back and laid out the ingredients for a cerulean, absinthe-based cocktail that he garnished with a golden berry.
It was not so long ago that far different, far less palatable concoctions — urine, coffee grounds, table salt, to name a few choice ingredients — were mixed inside this same building, mere steps from where he stood.
The restaurant, La Punto, is a Sochi gastro pub recommended to fans on the World Cup website that just so happens to be in the same building that housed the notorious anti-doping laboratory at the centre of one of the most elaborate cheating schemes in sports history.
Here, Grigory Rodchenkov — the chemist who ran drug-testing in Russia for a decade, including at the 2014 Sochi Olympics — spent the overnight hours of those games tampering with more than a hundred urine samples to conceal the widespread use of banned, performance-enhancing drugs among Russia’s top athletes.
This month, as another major international sporting event rolls through this city, the structure can be seen as a lingering symbol of the shadow from which Russian sports are still trying to emerge, a discomfiting monument to the dark art of doping.
But Tuesday night, as fans packed the restaurant to watch Russia pound out a win over Egypt, the building that placed a pockmark on Russian sports suddenly became a venue to celebrate it.
“It is an extremely positive thing,” said Artyom Zhuk, 35, a sailor from Novorossiysk, when asked about the building’s transformation at the World Cup. “We want people to come here, have fun and see that Russians are friendly.”
Minutes later, as if on cue, a nearby table with a dozen Panamanian fans started a chant of “Russia! Russia!” to acknowledge the home team’s surprise lead.
The only allusions to the building’s dark past are embedded deep within the restaurant’s extensive cocktail menu, where tipplers in the know might notice the B-Sample — tequila, sambuca and Tabasco sauce — the name of the supplementary urine sample required in Olympic drug testing.
“Is the B-Sample yellow?” asked Richard McLaren, who spent much of 2016 investigating what happened at the Sochi lab,. (It is.)
“It effectively acknowledges some of the things that went on, but at the same time it trivializes it,” he added. “I get the humour in it.”
World Cup fans this month have descended upon the restaurant in droves, drawn to the numerous large televisions, eclectic menu and friendly waiters.