The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin’s Secret Doping Empire

As director of the infamous Moscow Laboratory entrusted with making sure no Russian athlete ever tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, Grigory Rodchenkov performed his job brilliantly for more than 10 years. He is now famous for blowing the whistle on the scheme to swap clean urine from hundreds of Russian athletes for dirty drug-testing samples during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, as revealed i n the 2017 Oscar-winning documentary Icarus.

A former competitive runner – he himself doped with steroids in the 1980s – turned chemist, Rodchenkov had expert knowledge of the constantly-evolving science of drug testing. After years of suspicion, investigations and the threat of exposure, the Russian deception at Sochi and his role in it were revealed in a report by former wada president Dick Pound in 2015. Rodchenkov began to fear for his life, and f led to Los Angeles. Now 62, he was granted asylum in 2019, but he has moved multiple times, still lives in fear and has not seen his wife or two adult children in five years. Meanwhile, the fallout from the McLaren Report, which resulted in Russian athlete bans, appeals, reinstatements and more bans – “an endless war,” in Rodchenkov’s words – is temporarily on hold, thanks to the pandemic.

He says he did it because he had no choice, and now that he is free, he wants to tell the truth. He also wants to set the record straight on the parts of Pound’s 2015 report that weren’t true (e.g., that he extorted money from athletes to hide positive samples). As we saw in Icarus, Rodchenkov is a character, skewering wada as a “hot air machine” and Pound for routinely falling asleep during meetings. He has little left to lose in not coming fully clean, so to speak. Those who don’t think he should profit from his misdeeds will decry this book. Others will welcome it as the compelling story of the Russian doping scandal, by the guy whose life and l ivelihood depended on masterminding it.— CR