Reedie failed to act on MoS story

THE president of the World Anti-Doping Agency has admitted he should have done more to investigate claims of systematic doping in Russia when it was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday three years ago.

Craig Reedie is under increasing pressure to explain why his organisation did not do more to tackle the widespread doping when whistleblowers revealed their experiences on these pages in July 2013.

The International Olympic Committee have banned the Russian team from the Rio Olympics. But on BBC Radio 4’s Today show, presenter John Humphrys suggested to Reedie that he could have halted the racket before it made a mockery of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Humphrys said: ‘I’ve got a Mail article in front of me from July 2013 that told us precisely what was happening and it’s inconceivable that you, your organisation didn’t know what was going on isn’t it?’

Reedie didn’t directly answer the question but admitted WADA should have done more.

‘We were aware of information passed to us by whistleblowers but did not have the legal powers to deal with it,’ said Reedie. ‘We would have had to change our whole constitution to do that. In retrospect maybe we should have. All we could do was pass information on to the sponsoring national anti-doping organisation, which was the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, and that wouldn’t have made any sense.’

A report last week by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren revealed Russia covered up at least 312 positive doping tests over three years. A Russian secret police agent was also found to have posed as a sewer engineer in order to manipulate testing in Sochi.

Back in 2013, The Mail On Sunday revealed Russian athletes were doping under instruction from coaches, assisted by cover-ups at the country’s main anti-doping laboratory. The Russian 400m runner Valentin Kruglyakov claimed some athletes with ‘falsely clean’ tests went to the London Olympics.