DISTURBING TRAIL OF COVERUPS
Damaging report may bring Russia a step closer to being banned from Rio Olympics
TORONTO Two reporters from Russian television were standing in the mezzanine of a downtown Toronto hotel, having just listened to the staggering allegations of yet another report into the anti-doping practices in Russian sport. They were trying to distil the charges reported by Richard McLaren, the Canadian law professor who conducted a two-month investigation at the behest of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
“The main message is, ‘Russia is bad, let’s ban Russia,’ ” one reporter said to the other. Pretty much, yeah. To be clear, McLaren didn’t say anything about banning Russia from the Rio Olympics, or any other sporting contest. It wasn’t part of his mandate, he said. But he did describe the many ways in which Russian sport has been naughty.
McLaren’s team said it built on previous reports and allegations, and conducted its own investigations to conclude that the main Moscow drug lab, which existed in theory as a key element of ensuring Russian athletes were clean, had since 2011 operated as the opposite, as a site where positive drug tests were simply erased from the system — the “disappearing positive methodology,” as McLaren termed it — and replaced with negative results.
He said this system was overseen by the Ministry of Sport, with initial positive results at the Moscow lab sent all the way up the chain to the deputy minister, who would decide whether the results were to be reversed, based on the athlete’s specific profile. The best athletes, the medal contenders, were more likely to be protected.
This procedure, the report alleges, was the “fail-safe” in a system that also included a wild program of “sample swapping” at the drug lab in Sochi, where agents of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, took part in smuggling dirty samples out of the lab, somehow removing the caps on the tamper-proof sample bottles, and replacing the contents with clean urine that was then smuggled back into the lab. The report describes what it calls a “mouse hole” that the bottles passed through — it was literally a little hole drilled in the wall — and one could be forgiven for wondering if the various allegations are just a little too ridiculous to be true. FSB agents worked undercover in the drug lab — one was a “sewage and plumbing employee” in the lab, McLaren said, which is a hell of a cover for someone who is manipulating the results of pee tests — and they passed bottles through a secret mouse hole? You have to admit it has a bit of a Boris and Natasha vibe.
McLaren, though, said repeatedly on Monday morning that the conclusions of his report were accurate, despite the compressed timeline for its production. (He was appointed in May, after allegations of the hijinks at the Sochi lab were reported by the New York Times and 60 Minutes.) He said he was “supremely confident” in the report and also “unwaveringly confident” in it. Though much of the basis for it was the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow and Sochi labs who was the primary source for the original media reports, McLaren said there were other witnesses, some of whom remain confidential, and that his team was able to corroborate elements of Rodchenkov’s allegations. The Russian doctor had said, for example, that the FSB had figured out a way to crack the tamper-proof bottles, and McLaren’s team studied sample bottles and found evidence, he said, of tampering: tiny scratches and marks around the lids that were only evident upon close examination.
“We don’t know how the Russians did it, but we know that they did it,” McLaren said.
The glaring absence from Monday’s presentation was any attempt to identify specific athletes whose samples might have been tampered with, as McLaren said they simply did not have time to do such a thorough accounting. But if the broader allegations are true — that the doping regime was covered up at the highest levels of the sports ministry, that it was, in McLaren’s words, “an intertwined network of state involvement” — then it’s hard to have confidence that any Russian athlete is clean. There were early reports that countries, including Canada and the United States, would ask the International Olympic Committee to ban all Russian athletes from competing at Rio, and while McLaren refused to comment on such a move, he did say the coverup “covers the vast majority of sports.”
What the IOC will do with all this is another question. There’s no doubt that, in a world that usually deals with very specific results of very specific tests, where samples are controlled and tested and retested before punishment is levied, these are uncomfortably broad charges, in an extra-legal proceeding, where a lot of the evidence is circumstantial. The Russians have said that Rodchenkov is a fabulist who fled their country and that he can’t be trusted. They ask why McLaren didn’t seek Russian cooperation in this investigation. (Having sought their help in his last work for WADA on this subject and been rebuffed, he said, he didn’t try again. “We found that process singularly unhelpful,” he said of his previous efforts to get Russians to take part in the probe.) And to judge just by the response of the Russian media in Toronto on Monday, the country remains skeptical of this whole enterprise, which they think is steeped in old Cold War tensions. They think their athletes are being unfairly targeted.
The IOC will have to decide which side it believes. It’s expected to do so as early as Tuesday.