Anti-doping head aided cheats

MOSCOW—Even as he worked to cover up doping by Russian athletes, Grigory Rodchenkov was developing technology which would help to catch them years later.

The former head of the Moscow antidoping laboratory is the star witness for the World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Richard McLaren, whose report Friday accused Russia of operating a state-backed doping program which covered up more than 1,000 tainted drug test samples, including for medalists at the 2014 Winter Olympics.

However, Rodchenkov’s role in helping catch drug cheats isn’t widely known outside a small circle of the world’s leading antidoping scientists.

Methods devised by Rodchenkov and his former assistant at the lab, Timofei Sobolevsky, to detect two common steroids have become a crucial weapon for drug testers in a wave of retesting carried out this year by the International Olympic Committee, though some dispute the Russians’ work.

So far, 62 athletes — almost half of them Russians — have been disqualified from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics in IOC retests after testing positive for turinabol, a banned substance which Rodchenkov helped make much easier for labs to find in samples.

There are also six cases involving oxandrolone, another steroid on which Rodchenkov carried out research, though all but one of those also tested positive for turinabol, a black-market steroid developed in the old East Germany which bulks up muscle and has plagued global sport for decades.

“Even if they are old and quite well known substances, there is continuous research on the metabolic behavior of these substances,” said Tiia Kuuranne, head of the laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, which handles retests for the International Olympic Committee. (AP)