How dirty Russians corrupted London 2012
MORE than 1,000 Russian athletes from 30 Olympic and Paralympic sports benefited from a state-sponsored doping programme that investigators have proved ‘corrupted the London 2012 Olympics on an unprecedented scale’. Canadian law professor Richard McLaren yesterday published the second part of an astonishing independent report, revealing the immense sophistication of Russian cheating between 2011 and 2015. Last night there were calls for Russia to be stripped of the 2018 World Cup. United States Anti-Doping chief Travis Tygart said: ‘No international sporting events should be held in Russia until its programme is fully World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code compliant and all the individuals who participated in the corruption are held accountable.’ McLaren said: ‘The Russian Olympic team corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established. ‘This corruption involved the ongoing use of prohibited substances, washout testing
16-strong list for Sports Personality of the Year, because Team Sky are considered to have explaining to do.
Compare that scrutiny to the attitude in Russia where hard evidence of cheating — no prissy therapeutic exemptions in this scandal — are dismissed as little more than a Western conspiracy.
‘I can’t grasp what WADA wants to achieve,’ added Svishchev. ‘Either they want Russia to be excluded from the world sports family, or they want to really put things right everywhere, Russia included. To do that, they should start with themselves. We won’t make peace with this defamation. We admit we have our issues, but there is no need to demonise us.’
So WADA are the crooks, not the country that spiked samples with coffee granules and salt — so much salt, in some cases, that it would be impossible for a human to live. WADA are the cheats, not the country that provided 27 medal winners over two Olympics, whose samples had either been tampered with or were implicated in tampering. WADA are wrong, not the country whose test lab sent emails to the Ministry of Sport, asking what they should do with positive samples.
We cannot continue like this. We cannot continue making discoveries, knowing what we know, with this information having no consequence. The lickspittle Olympic chief Thomas Bach says he has no regrets over letting Russia compete in Rio, when this report as good as proves it was an utter dereliction of his duty, and he should resign.
InfAnTInO cannot now be allowed to tread the same compromised, craven path. A World Cup in Russia will have no credibility or integrity. It will endorse cheating and pander to the very men who pull those strings.
To send it there was a bad decision from the start and will be a worse decision now. Yet, equally, fIfA have the chance to do the world of sport a great service and take down an institution that has become a byword for corruption.
Yes, we may appreciate the irony of that position; but, inescapably, it is an opportunity, too. and false reporting. The ministry of sport was working to discipline athletes in advance of the London Games into taking the cocktail of steroids . . . in order to beat the detection thresholds at the London lab.’ The Moscow testing laboratory covered up at least 1,231 positive samples, with footballers certainly among those athletes on the Russian doping programme. Dirty urine samples were swapped with clean samples, on some occasions using salt, water, sediment and coffee granules to imitate the original. Other positive tests were simply switched or mixed with urine provided by coaches or family members, with cheating athletes seen bringing in clean samples in babies’ bottles or soft drinks flasks. Investigators found male and female DNA in a single sample and salt levels that would have been ‘physiologically impossible’ to produce. Russian secret service agents also developed a method for opening sealed sample collection bottles without detection. Russia won 24 gold, 26 silver and 32 bronze medals in London, with their athletes escaping detection at the time of the Games. ‘The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and ethical compass and Olympic values of fair play,’ said McLaren. This was a systematic doping programme designed to win medals and was upgraded in response to the introduction of more stringent global drug-testing procedures.’ A sports ministry headed by the controversial Vitaly Mutko, who is in charge of the 2018 World Cup and still a member of the FIFA executive committee, enlisted secret service agents to devise the method for breaking into sample bottles. And they would not have been exposed had Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow which became the hub of the Russian doping programme, not blown the whistle in such detail to the New York Times earlier this year. Rodchenkov then explained to investigators how the ‘magicians’, as McLaren called them yesterday, developed a metal tool that was ‘thin enough but strong enough’ to open the bottles. At the same time the doping programme was centralised at the Moscow lab and had its own clean urine bank. A satellite lab was also established in Sochi — complete with a ‘mouse-hole’ to enable corrupt officials to switch dirty urine with clean samples — for the 2014 winter Olympics.
McLaren added: ‘In order to verify the truth of Dr Rodchenkov’s disclosures, the independent report engaged a world recognised expert in firearms and toolmarks examinations to conduct an experiment. The experiment verified that the removal and re-screwing of the cap could be accomplished without leaving visible signs to the untrained eye.’ In a technical briefing by chief investigator Martin Dubbey, whose background is in law enforcement, it was explained that only under inspection with a microscope could it be seen that bottles had been tampered with. To test their expert, they presented 13 bottles with an untampered example among them. The expert had no trouble identifying it. The new evidence, McLaren claimed, ‘sharpens the picture and confirms the findings of the first report’. The report stated that 15 Russian medallists in London benefited from a doping programme masterminded by the ministry of sport with the assistance of the secret service. So far, ten of those athletes have been stripped of their medals. But evidence in the report found that 78 Russian athletes who competed at London 2012 had positive tests hidden by the Moscow lab. It is also now indisputable that the Sochi winter Olympics, at which Russia topped the medals table as the host nation, was severely corrupted, too. Investigators discovered that two female ice hockey players had male DNA in their samples. Two athletes who claimed four golds between them were found to have physiologically impossible salt readings. A further 12 Russian medal winners were found to have escaped detection thanks to sample bottles that had been tampered with. McLaren spoke of ‘an institutionalised doping conspiracy and cover-up’, with the evidence corroborating the key findings of his explosive interim report which was published in July. The seven-month investigation was based on more than 1,100 pieces of evidence. ‘The key findings of the first report remain unchanged,’ said McLaren. ‘The forensic testing, which is based on immutable facts, is conclusive. The evidence does not depend on verbal testimony to draw a conclusion. Rather, it tests the physical evidence and a conclusion is drawn from those results.’ McLaren said it was impossible to know how far back the conspiracy went. But by 2011 the Russians had an ‘in the field’ doping programme that involved corrupting doping control officers and corrupt coaches as well as a system for switching samples. In a clear message to those who criticised his interim report, most notably the IOC, McLaren said he was dismayed by the ‘in-fighting’ that marked the build-up to Rio Games and has continued. ‘It needs to stop,’ he said. ‘My investigation has gone a long way to bringing this dark secret out into the open and now we need to work as a team.’ He also said it would be ‘prudent’ to examine all the old-style sample bottles currently in WADAaccredited labs around the world, given the possibility that other countries may have used a similar system. The names of the 1,000 athletes — 82 per cent of whom are from summer sports and 18 per cent from winter — will be passed to their international sports federations.
How they used salt and coffee to rig tests