The inside dope: How the Russians fiddled the books
The allegations:
MEMBERS of Russia’s secret service intimidated workers at a drug-testing lab to cover up top athletes’ positive results.
They impersonated lab engineers during the Winter Olympics in Sochi last year. A lab once destroyed more than 1 400 samples.
Athletes adopted false identities to avoid unexpected testing. Some paid to make doping violations disappear. Others bribed the anti-doping authorities to ensure favourable results, and top sports officials routinely submitted bogus urine samples for athletes who were doping.
These allegations were among hundreds contained in a report released this week by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada). Across 323 pages, it implicates athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors and various Russian institutions, laying out what is likely the most extensive state-sponsored doping programme since the notorious 1970s East German regime.
In addition to providing a granular look at systematic doping, the group that drafted the report made extraordinary recommendations, including a proposal that Russia be suspended from competition by track and field’s governing body and barred from track and field events at next year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“It’s worse than we thought,” Dick Pound, founding president of Wada and an author of the report, said at a news conference in a Geneva hotel.
“This is an old attitude from the Cold War days.”
Russian officials responded with defiance, disputing the investigation’s findings. “Whatever we do, everything is bad,” Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s sports minister, told the news agency Interfax. “If this whole system needs to shut down, we will shut it down gladly. We will stop paying fees, stop funding the Russian anti-doping agency, the Moscow anti-doping laboratory. We will only save money.”
Moscow lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, whom the report accused of having solicited and accepted bribes, dismissed the suggestions. “This is an independent commission which only issues recommendations,” he said. “There are three fools sitting there who don’t understand the laboratory.”
Pound said he had presented the group’s findings to Mutko before they were released publicly. “He’s frustrated to some degree,” he said. “He certainly knew what was going on. They all knew.”
The report also recommended that Wada impose lifetime bans on five Russian coaches and five athletes, including the gold and bronze medalists in the women’s 800m at the 2012 London Olympics.
“The Olympic Games in London were, in a sense, sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing,” the report read.
Bans from competition are not all that could come of the inquiry. Pound said the agency had negotiated a cooperation agreement with Interpol and had handed over extensive documents and evidence.
Interpol confirmed that cooperation with its own announcement this week, noting that related inquiries stretched from Singapore to France.
In June 2015 Wada released its first set of statistics on doping violations. The violations, taken from 2013 data, included 115 countries and 89 sports. Russia had the highest number of violations — 225 across 30 sports — with 42 of them coming from track and field events.
Last week the French authorities said that they had opened a criminal probe into the former president of track and field’s world governing body, Lamine Diack of Senegal, over allegations that he accepted bribes to allow about six Russian athletes to participate in competitions, including the 2012 Olympics. and Günter Younger, head of cybercrime for the police in the German state of Bavaria.
Wada’s foundation and executive board will decide whether to act on the recommendations; they are scheduled to meet next week in Colorado Springs, the US, an event that motivated the timing of the release of the commission’s report, Pound said.
Nikolai Valuev, a former Russian heavyweight boxing champion, said on Rossiya 24 TV channel: “In recent times I hear only about investigations of Russian athletes. This has already become a system, too.”
Russia is scheduled to host the next soccer World Cup, in 2018, although the Swiss authorities are investigating allegations that Russia might have secured the event through under-the-table agreements.
The Moscow laboratory implicated in the report is set to oversee testing for Fifa during the World Cup. The lab did not immediately respond to a request for comment. — © The New York Times News Service
It’s worse than we thought. This is an old attitude from the Cold War days The implicated Moscow lab is set to oversee testing for Fifa during the 2018 World Cup