Athletics: the Russian doping scandal

You might have thought you were inured to the scale of doping in modern sport, said Nick Greenslade in The Sunday Times. But nothing could have prepared any of us for the extraordinary allegations about Russia and how far it has gone to give its athletes an advantage. The evidence is so overwhelming that, last year, the World Anti-doping Agency (Wada) saw fit to accuse the country of “state-sponsored doping”; it threw the book at Russia, suspending it from international athletics indefinitely. And in recent weeks, there have been even more damaging revelations. When the International Olympic Committee retested samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, it found that 54 athletes tested positive. Remarkably, almost half (22) were Russian.

But that’s nothing compared to the scandal of the 2014 Winter Olympics, which Russia hosted, said Rebecca R. Ruiz in The New York Times. The Russian authorities went to incredible lengths to drug its athletes and cover up what they were doing – that is the claim of the self-alleged architect of this deceit, Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran Russia’s anti-doping laboratory from 2005 to 2015. He’s now spilled the beans, painting a picture of a wildly corrupt scheme that knew no limits. Rodchenkov claims he developed a cocktail of steroids that, once dissolved in alcohol – vermouth for women, whisky for men – was given to top athletes by officials from Russia’s sports ministry. Rodchenkov says that during the Winter Olympics, held at the Russian ski resort of Sochi, he and his colleagues bamboozled Wada: assisted by a cadre of intelligence agents, they replaced dozens of tainted samples with clean urine that had been collected months earlier. They secretly cut a hole in the wall of the official testing lab and, in the dead of night, swapped the suspect samples for clean ones. Russia went on to top the medals table at Sochi, and for his contribution Rodchenkov was given the Order of Friendship by President Putin. After Wada suspended Russia, however, he was forced to resign and, fearing for his life, he fled to the US. Since then, two former close colleagues have died unexpectedly.

Needless to say, Russia denies the claim that the state was in any way involved in doping, insisting that the athletes who tested positive were rogue offenders, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Now, having disqualified 19 coaches and announced reforms, it maintains it has done enough for its ban to be lifted for the Rio Olympics – and a decision is due later this month. Sadly, Russia is almost certain to get its way: athletics’ governing bodies don’t have the bottle to teach it a lesson. But that would be a terrible mistake. If the allegations are true, “this is a scandal of a scale never witnessed before”.