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 Anti-Doping 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 drug-test results from a Moscow anti-doping 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 antidoping 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 New York Times 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 ‘‘old-school 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