The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Scale of 2012 doping by Russia unprecedented, says damning report
Investigation for Wada “confirms findings” of explosive interim report
Russian athletes corrupted the London 2012 Olympic Games “on an unprecedented scale”, a seven-month investigation into the country’s state-run doping programme has revealed.
The findings of the investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren and conducted for the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), were published yesterday.
McLaren found evidence that more than 1,000 Russian athletes in more than 30 Olympic and Paralympic sports were involved in a doping conspiracy which began at least as early as 2011 and ran until last year.
The 144-page McLaren report “sharpens the picture and confirms the findings” of his explosive interim report published in July, three weeks before the start of the Rio Olympics.
As well as the report, Wada has provided a searchable database of emails, forensic reports, laboratory tests and spreadsheets totalling more than 1,100 items.
Even this, McLaren said at a media conference in London, is “not the complete picture” as his team was denied access to the Moscow anti-doping laboratory’s computer server and the hundreds of athletes’ samples still in its freezers.
In a damning indictment, McLaren explained how the conspiracy started as a response to a poor showing at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
McLaren said the scheme in operation for London 2012 was based on athletes using a cocktail of steroids mixed with alcohol to limit the detection window, and on the Moscow anti-doping laboratory hiding positive tests by Russian athletes.
“The Russian Olympic team corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established,” he said.
“The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and ethical compass and Olympic values of fair play.”
Russia won 24 gold, 26 silver and 32 bronze medals in London, while no Russian athlete failed a drugs test at the time of the Games.
McLaren, however, has now found evidence that positive samples from 78 athletes, including 15 medallists, simply disappeared. Ten of those medal-winners were caught in the International Olympic Committee’s retesting of London samples this year, but five remain unpunished.
It is a similar story for the World Athletics Championships in Moscow, where four athletes had their positive samples swapped for clean ones.
And at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, 12 medal-winning athletes are among those implicated. Their names, along with the hundreds of others identified by McLaren, have now gone to their respective sports federations for them to start disciplinary proceedings.
The central message from the report is that claims made in May by the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory Grigory Rodchenkov are true.