Pub that lies at heart of Russia’s drug scandal
Where the bartender now makes an absinthe-based cocktail that he garnishes with a golden berry was not long ago a setting for 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 the bartender 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 building that housed the notorious anti-doping laboratory at the centre of one of the most elaborate cheating schemes in sports history. One for which Russia paid a $15 million fine early this year.
Here, Dr Grigory Rodchenkov --- the chemist who ran drug-testing in Russia for a decade, including at the 2014 Sochi Olympics --- spent hours tampering with more than a hundred urine samples to conceal the widespread use of banned, performance-enhancing drugs among Russia’s top athletes.
But the building that placed a pockmark on Russian sports suddenly has now become 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 trans- formation at the World Cup.
“We want people to come here, have fun, and see that Russians are friendly.”
CHEERS TO B-SAMPLE
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.
“It effectively acknowledges some of the things that went on, but at the same time it trivialises it,” said Richard McLaren, who spent much of 2016 investigating what happened at the Sochi lab. “I get the humour in it.”
La Punto has two swank dining rooms connected by dank, dimly lit hallways, the very ones Rodchenkov surreptitiously roamed at night while executing the elaborate scheme to swap out dirty samples for clean ones. Those hallways now echo with the pulse of dance music.
Most diners, even those well versed in the ins and outs of the melodramatic scandal, seemed unaware of the building’s sketchy past.
“I didn’t know that was in here!” said Karla Espinosa, a soccer fan from Panama City. “I’m going to take a picture so I can show my friends.”
The absinthe-based cocktail was called Meldonium, which happens to be the name of the banned substance that led to Maria Sharapova’s suspension from tennis.
Rodchenkov four years ago proudly formulated a cocktail known as the Duchess — a blend of three anabolic steroids mixed with Chivas Regal whiskey for men and Martini-brand vermouth for women.
Richard Pound, the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who led an early investigation into Russian doping, said he thought the doping scandal had cast a shadow over the World Cup, though “probably not as big or as dark a one as would be appropriate”.