Russian anti-doping chief victim of death threats
A poster in the Moscow office of Russia’s anti-doping chief Yuri Ganus shows a hulking ship ploughing through a thick slab of ice under a violent, fiery sky. Athletes holding trophies high follow the vessel.
Ganus commissioned the image as a sort of mission statement.
‘‘We’re breaking many years’ ice of tolerance to doping. We are clearing a road for clean athletes,’’ he explained. ‘‘We’re working under fire from different sides.’’
As head of the Russian AntiDoping Agency (Rusada), Ganus is at the centre of Russia’s years-long scandal over state-sponsored doping, which has led to the country’s ban from this summer’s Tokyo Olympics and all other international competitions for four years – including the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
Ganus also stands alone among Russia’s anti-doping officials calling for an overhaul of Russia’s sports oversight.
The country’s sports leadership has denied manipulating a database of its athletes’ old drugtest results from a Moscow antidoping laboratory. But Ganus has brazenly asserted that Russia’s officials attempted to mislead investigators from the World AntiDoping
Agency (Wada), the watchdog group for international sports. Wada imposed the four-year ban on Russia in December.
In another country, he might be hailed as a truth-teller. But public dissent is rare and discouraged in the Russia of President Vladimir Putin. It can also stir worries of possible retaliation.
Whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow anti-doping lab, fled Russia in 2015 and is in the US witness protection programme.
Ganus said he had been on the receiving end of death threats.
‘‘I’m disturbed about it,’’ Ganus said. ‘‘When somebody tried to [pressure] me, I said, ‘I’m working for the national interests. Which interests are you working for?’,’’
The 55-year-old Ganus doesn’t consider this a job but ‘‘a mission’’ to preserve the reputation of Russian athletics for future generations, he said.
Outside of playing handball as a boy, his background was more business than sports.
He studied marine engineering, the inspiration for the icebreaker ship metaphor he turned into a poster. But Ganus was distressed that the doping controversy kept Russia from participating in the 2016 Summer Paralympics, a particular passion of his. That’s what prompted him to apply for the post of Rusada’s director general.
Russia was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, for its doping saga. Athletes deemed clean competed under a neutral flag, as they will in Tokyo this summer. Wada offered Russia a path to reinstatement, but a condition was turning over a database from its old Moscow lab. Wada investigators later said the data was inconsistent from the whistleblower’s copy they received in 2017.
Ganus claims he didn’t have a role in fudging the data, but he said he has ‘‘many, many, many times thought about’’ why Russia might do it. Perhaps, he has said, it was to protect results from the 2014 Sochi Olympics, which saw the country win 29 medals, tying for the most of any participant.
During a conference in Colorado Springs in October, Ganus admitted in an interview with the
that the database had been changed – two weeks before a Wada committee even met to discuss potentially levying harsher penalties against Russia.
Ganus said that shortly after his comments were published, he fielded calls from Russian politicians accusing him of trying to drum up some personal publicity.
He rejected that notion and said that after his internal memos about replacing the country’s top sports officials and rejecting their ‘‘oldschool approaches’’ had been ignored, he hoped to get their attention through the media. He said he’s been blacklisted from Russia’s state-run television.
‘‘I understand that I involve big negative on myself,’’ Ganus said. ‘‘I received calls when I was in Colorado Springs, ‘Do you want to go back to Russia?’ Why do I even have to think about it? The truth is on my side.’’
For Russian leaders, however, the anti-doping sanctions has been labelled as a conspiracy against the country. Putin said in December that the ban is ‘‘not fair’’ and ‘‘an attempt to get rid of competition’’.
Former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Wada’s decision ‘‘makes one think that this is just a continuation of that antiRussian hysteria that has become chronic’’.
Rusada has appealed the fouryear ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Ganus said he disagreed with the appeal but was overruled, so he attached a personal note of protest with it. A decision is expected by the end of March.
But trust in Russia’s sports officials has eroded to the point that the international community is wary of Ganus, too.
Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, said he ‘‘affectionately’’ refers to Ganus as ‘‘fancy bear’’, a reference to the Russian cyberespionage group that hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
‘‘On the one hand, you really want to support him and embrace him for some of the positions he’s taken,’’ Tygart said. ‘‘On the flip side, you want to be very cautious that the powers that he reports to, as you’re embracing him, aren’t reaching in your back pocket and stealing your wallet.’’
Ganus said the death threats had stopped, and it’s ‘‘not in the interest of Russia to make a problem’’ for him.
In his two-plus years on the job, he’s overturned 90 per cent of Rusada’s staff and secured a bit more independence by getting funding from the finance ministry rather than the sports ministry. The office’s hallways are lined with handwritten notes from other antidoping agencies around the world, encouraging Ganus and Russia’s athletes to fight for clean competition.
Along with the first icebreaker poster, his office put out another drawing with a mirror dividing two sides – the ‘‘good’’ with athletes holding aloft the Russian flag versus the ‘‘bad’’ with demoniclooking creatures with medals around their necks.
‘‘Look at yourself in the mirror of human values,’’ it reads. ‘‘Decide which side you’re on.’’
As his loyalty to Russia has been questioned by Russians, he’s responded with an Abraham Lincoln quote – that ‘‘true patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety’’.
‘‘Patriotism is not loyalty to officials,’’ Ganus said. ‘‘It’s not loyalty to the president, it’s loyalty to the country.’’
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