Russian doping program laid bare by mountain of evidence
LONDON — A new report by the world’s anti-doping watchdog has laid out mountainous proof of Russia’s systematic doping from 2011 to 2015, implicating layers of government employees and more than 1,000 athletes in over 30 sports, and intensifying pressure on the International Olympic Committee to penalize Russia ahead of the 2018 Winter Games.
The evidence, published by the World Anti-Doping Agency, was the coda to a set of investigations conducted by the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, who issued a damning report in July that prompted more than 100 Russian athletes to be barred from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
“It is impossible to know just how deep and how far back this conspiracy goes,” McLaren said Friday, calling the “immutable facts” of his report clear but far from comprehensive.
“For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians.”
McLaren concluded last summer that Russia had orchestrated rampant doping dating back years that culminated in an elaborate urine-swapping operation at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, confirming what The New York Times had reported in May.
But in the face of staunch denials from Russian officials and skepticism from sports authorities reluctant to punish the nation on his word, he and a team have continued their work these last five months.
Asked for their evidence, they zeroed in on the individuals who enabled the cheating as well as those who benefited from it, publishing on Friday more than 1,166 pieces of proof, including emails, documents and expert scientific and forensic analysis of doping samples.
The report outlined competitions that had been tainted by years of extraordinary preparations, ensuring Russia’s dominance at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, 2013 track and field world championships in Moscow and 2014 Sochi Games.
As part of his inquiry, McLaren examined some 100 urine samples of Russian athletes from Sochi out of a total of approximately 250 that have been preserved since 2014. All of them had been tampered with, McLaren said, including those of at least 15 medallists, four of them gold.
The names of most of those athletes were redacted but their identities had been privately shared with the relevant officials for each sport’s global governing body.
Outside of the Olympics, sports governing bodies have autonomy over sanctioning athletes for violations like doping or sample manipulation.
His evidence included key communications between Russia’s former deputy sports minister Yuri Nagornykh — who was dismissed amid scandal last summer — and Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the nation’s former anti-doping lab director who told The Times last spring exactly how he had helped top Russian athletes dope on government orders.
Nagornykh and the sports ministry gave Rodchenkov explicit direction to cover up top athletes’ use of performance-enhancing steroids, emails and spreadsheets showed.
As McLaren laid bare nearly all of the cards in his hand Friday, he made it undisputedly clear the extent to which one of the most powerful nations repeatedly cheated in sports.
His report and an accompanying searchable website of evidence leaves little doubt that Russia’s doping program was among the most sophisticated in sports history, perhaps ranking only behind that of the East German regime.
In response, the IOC plans to inspect the roughly 150 samples from Sochi that have yet to be scrutinized, examining them for evidence of banned substances — unlikely to be found under the scenario of urine substitution — as well as DNA mismatches in urine samples and other signs of tampering that McLaren’s team spoke of in the summer: microscopic scratches on the glass sample bottles, as well as levels of table salt that experts say are physiologically impossible for human beings to produce.
Rodchenkov had said he added salt or water at the Sochi Games, to make certain scientific specifications on tampered-with samples match those of original, tainted urine samples.
Russia is set to hold the world championships in bobsled and skeleton in Sochi in two months. U.S. athletes have talked about boycotting that event as a show of dissatisfaction with sports officials’ handling of the Russian doping scandal.
One of the chief criticisms Russian officials and some global sports authorities had made of McLaren’s initial work was that he had not heard Russia’s side of the story. In Friday’s report, he addressed that possible vulnerability, invoking his communications with Vitaly Smirnov, a former longtime Olympic official from Russia whom President Vladimir Putin appointed last summer to lead antidoping reform.
Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s former minister of sport whom Putin recently elevated to deputy prime minister, was unable to meet with McLaren, the report said.