Russian memos provide the inside dope
A 50-PAGE affidavit and supporting documents submitted to the IOC by the whistleblower at the centre of the Russian doping scandal will increase the pressure on Olympic officials who meet next week to decide whether to ban the country from the Winter Games.
The Times has obtained copies of two explosive memos about the Russian doping system that the former Moscow laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov says are in the affidavit that he sent to Russia’s World Cup chief, Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister at the time. The affidavit was last month sent to the IOC’s Schmid Commission, which has been ordered to produce concrete findings regarding claims of Russia having operated a state-sponsored doping system.
The IOC executive board will make a decision on Tuesday about Russian involvement in February’s Pyeongchang Olympics.
One memo is a detailed history of Russia’s doping programme that Rodchenkov has told the commission he sent to Mutko in January 2015 after German broadcaster ARD revealed the scandal.
It warns of the ‘‘danger’’ of samples stored by the IOC from previous Olympics being retested. ‘‘If Beijing samples were to be retested with the help of the latest analytical equipment, it would lead to catastrophe,’’ the memo says.
It adds: ‘‘The worst is yet to come,’’ and urges an effort be made to prevent the IAAF from retesting samples, saying: ‘‘After receiving first positive results, they won’t be able to stop – under the pressure from the public and from Wada [World Anti-Doping Agency], they will be forced to retest all the samples of Russian athletes.’’
Another memo, from 2011, warns that Russian race walkers were facing detection for doping by ‘‘the unmonitored use of both pharmaceutical and low-quality underground erythropoietin [EPO] in large doses’’.
Mutko, now Russia’s deputy prime minister, yesterday (Friday) strongly denied claims that Russia had operated a stateorganised doping system. Times