A Beatle dreams of Lennon

In the aftermath of the Beatles 1969 split, Paul McCartney would routinely shrug off his old band’s importance, said Dylan Jones in GQ (U.K.). That was partly a result of the Fab Four’s acrimonious breakup—McCartney had sued his fellow Beatles to prevent John Lennon’s conniving manager, Allen Klein, from seizing control of the group’s back catalog. “That was horrendous and it gave me some terrible times,” says McCartney. “I drank way too much.” Lennon started planting barbs in his solo lyrics, insinuating that “Yesterday” was the only Beatles song written by McCartney. It left McCartney racked with self-doubt, until he forced himself to appreciate his vast contributions: “Eleanor Rigby,” “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” and many more. He began to understand that the Beatles had been a family—“and families have disputes.” In the early days of the Beatles, they’d “be in the back of a van in the freezing British winter, so you had to lie on top of each other. That makes friends of people.” McCartney made up with Lennon years before his ex-bandmate was shot dead in 1980, “so we were friends till the end.” Now age 78, McCartney often has dreams in which he’s playing with Lennon or George Harrison, who died in 2001. “It’s normally very pleasant. I love those boys.”

Russia’s doping mastermind

Grigory Rodchenkov was the brains behind a vast sporting conspiracy, said Murad Ahmed in the Financial Times. As the former head of Moscow’s ironically named Anti-Doping Center, he gave cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of athletes, part of a Kremlin-approved scheme to secure Russia supremacy at the Olympics. A trained chemist, he created a three-drug mix that could foil blood tests so long as athletes took their PEDs with a booze chaser—men got Chivas whisky, women Martini vermouth. “We have the best researchers in my laboratory,” Rodchenkov says. “No other country could reach halfway what we did.” The proof of his chemical prowess was on show at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where Russia topped the standings with 13 gold medals. Then in 2016, Rodchenkov turned whistleblower—possibly because international sporting bodies had gotten wise to his scheme—and fled to the U.S. to live under witness protection, leaving his wife and children behind in Russia. Rodchenkov says Russian agents have tried to find him. “It’s the same [as] war. You are afraid during the first week. Then you live in war.” Russia has been stripped of its Sochi medals, but Rodchenkov doubts doping will ever be eliminated. “It’s a daydream. Sport won’t be clean. Never.”