Investigator McLaren unfazed by ‘nitpicking’

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Doping investigator Richard McLaren has defended his report into orchestrated Russian doping from what he called “nitpicking”.

Recent comments by sports bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, refer to inadequate translations of Russian documents and the likelihood some disciplinary cases against implicated athletes will fail.

“If you can’t attack the base then let’s go and attack the periphery,” McLaren said in an interview on Monday.

The Canadian lawyer spoke on the sidelines of a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) conference one hour after he sat in the audience and heard Russia’s sports minister suggest the evidence against individual athletes “is not sufficient”.

“Many of the comments being made are nitpicking about the small parts,” McLaren said.

“The substance of the merits of what I had to deal with has not really been challenged.”

McLaren detailed in two reports last year an orchestrated program of cheating that involved the Russian ministry of sport, FSB security service and national sports and antidoping bodies.

The plot helped the home team win medals at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2013 athletics world championships in Moscow.

Issues raised in recent weeks over the quality of translations by McLaren’s Russian-speaking staff were “a complete red herring to obfuscate and disguise what is going on,” he said.

McLaren said his task after being appointed by WADA last May was to verify claims of a state plot by former Moscow laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov, who led the Sochi Olympic lab, and not to prove doping cases against more than 1,000 Russian athletes.

“What is happening now is trying to turn the mandate into something it never was,” McLaren said.

“You can’t turn an examination of a system into a whole lot of individual cases.”

Earlier at the WADA event, Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov reiterated his country’s denials that the doping program was state-controlled — a claim he said even McLaren had withdrawn.

The original description in McLaren’s interim report last July was of a “state-dictated failsafe system” to cover up doping cases. It was changed to an “institutionalized” conspiracy in his final report published in December.

McLaren said he and Kolobkov had previously spoken about changing the language at Russia’s request because it implied a plot involving the highest levels of the Russian government.

“I decided that I would accept their view,” McLaren said.

“It is not necessarily the view I would have or that others might have of what is ‘state-sponsored’.”