Football’s Russian drugs ‘cover-up’
Eight months on and still no action Ethics team ‘denied access to evidence’
FIFA have flatly contradicted a claim by Russia’s deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko that there is no drug problem in Russian football by saying two female Under-20 players, detailed in a dossier of alleged cases handed over last December, have already been sanctioned for doping.
This newspaper revealed last week that Russia’s entire 23-man World Cup squad from 2014 were among 34 doping cases FIFA are investigating — details of which we publish today.
Mutko called our report ‘nonsense’ and said: ‘There has never been and will never be any problems with doping in our football.’
But FIFA have confirmed sanctions against two players already, providing no further details.
Dossiers on at least 34 players, compiled by an investigatory team headed by Canadian lawyer Prof Richard McLaren, were handed to FIFA in December via the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Given those 34 cases included only one woman and two have already been punished it seems the scale of FIFA’s inquiry is bigger than previously known.
That is certainly the belief of antidoping investigators, and three veteran insiders at FIFA have told The Mail on Sunday they fear a lack of urgency, and perhaps action, around the ‘McLaren cases’.
FIFA said in December they would ‘take the appropriate next steps in accordance with the anti-doping regulations’. Separately, FIFA’s ethics committee said they would examine McLaren’s report — and findings on football — ‘thoroughly’. But we can reveal:
Medical specialists with huge experience in anti-doping, including one with years of experience inside FIFA, say they are ‘baffled’ that ‘some cases with apparently clear indications of an AAF [adverse analytical finding]’ were ‘not obviously acted upon’ within weeks of FIFA getting information from WADA more than six months ago.
The investigations unit of FIFA’s ethics committee wanted to see if McLaren’s files implicated former Russian sports minister Mutko. They were already investigating him for other matters but a source claims ethics staff were denied access to the footballer doping information they wanted. FIFA say this claim is ‘entirely inaccurate’ but declined to provide more detail.
There are concerns that a named senior figure with ‘a vested interest’ in keeping Russia free from doping controversy has intervened on multiple occasions over several years to prevent drug cases against Russia footballers being pursued. ‘[There has been] silence, denial and deception,’ said a concerned third party.
It is unclear which individual inside FIFA has lead responsibility for the 34 cases. The former head of the medical department, Jiri Dvorak, was effectively forced out last November before the evidence arrived in Zurich. It was announced that a South African medic, Prof Efraim Kramer, was due to take over at least some of Dvorak’s work but Kramer replied to emailed questions that he was ‘away due to unforeseen medical reasons’. FIFA declined to comment on Kramer.
On the investigation in general, a spokesman said: ‘FIFA are currently investigating the allegations made against football players in the so-called McLaren report.
‘It has so far not been possible to demonstrate any anti-doping rule violation, but investigations remain open…It should be stressed that sanctions cannot be imposed based on mere suspicions or limited facts.’
Mutko was on the radar of FIFA’s independent ethics chamber before president Gianni Infantino effectively sacked senior investigator Cornel Borbely and judge HansJoachim Eckert in May. They wanted to asses whether Mutko was fit for football office if involved in doping and confirm, as the MoS reported in February, he had threatened a Russian doping whistleblower as long ago as 2013.
‘All information from WADA should, by right, have been accessible immediately to ethics [investigators],’ said a source. ‘Despite repeated requests, it never was.’
We asked FIFA whether they have examined 155 footballer urine samples relevant to the cases.
They say: ‘FIFA have undertaken comprehensive actions to identify potential anti-doping rule violations, including retesting of available samples.’
They failed to respond to a request for specific clarity over whether sample bottles had been examined for evidence of tampering — a vital issue.
Those 155 samples were ‘airlifted’ out of Moscow two years ago — when Russian officials were busily destroying evidence of institutional doping — and are currently at WADA’s flagship lab in Lausanne, Switzerland. McLaren’s hypothesis is that entire batches of sportspeople’s samples, including footballers, were tampered with, or ‘cleaned’.