REVEALED The meeting that turned London 2012 into Olympics sabotaged by Russian drugs cheats
The 2012 London Olympics was supposed to be one of the proudest, most uplifting events in the history of British sport. It will be remembered as the Games that began with Danny Boyle’s l auded opening ceremony and ended with Team GB winning 65 medals, 29 of them gold, a 104-year high.
‘Super Saturday’ was the most successful single day for Britain at any Olympics since 1908, producing six golds including titles for Jess Ennis-Hill, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah.
Yet London 2012 would later be described, in an official report into state-supported Russian doping, as ‘ sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing’.
And ultimately this came about because of an invitation sent by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the supposed guardians of sport, on behalf of the London organisers, to a Russian anti-doping official. The acceptance of that invitation gave the official privileged access to the nerve centre of London’s anti-doping lab, allowing him to help his compatriots cheat in 2012 and beyond.
Access to the lab, before and during the Games, meant he gained knowledge of a top-secret new test for human growth hormone, giving Russia insight to circumvent it.
The story of former Moscow laboratory boss Grigory Rod Rodchenkov is already known, wn, and infamous.
As The Mail on Sunday first revealed in 2013, he was central to Russia’s multi-sport, statesupported doping and cover-up programme.
He had to flee Russia in n 2015 and fears for his life, fe, somewhere inside the USA’s witness protection programme.
A documentary about his experience, Icarus, had a premiere in January, covered by this newspaper. But the film, by US director Bryan Fogel, does not get a global general release until August 4, when it begins to air on Netflix.
To say it feels like a Cold War thriller underplays the intrigue. And the IOC invitation episode — delivered to Rodchenkov at a Moscow psychiatric hospital after he tried to take his own life by stabbing himself in the heart — is staggering.
London 2012, in retrospect, has become a Games of disgrace for Russia. They ended the event with 82 medals (24 gold) and already 13 have been stripped ( 4 gold) for subsequent revelations of doping.
Mariya Savinova (800m), Yuliya Zaripova ( steeplechase), Sergey Kirdyapkin ( 50km walk) and Tatyana Lysenko (hammer) have lost golds. Major names from other sports remain under scrutiny. More medals are sure to go.
When the World Anti- Doping Agency (WADA) concluded in late 2015 that London 2012 had been ‘sabotaged’, Lord Coe, the organiser of those Games and by then head of the IAAF, was stunned. He said the situation was ‘deeply shocking and alarming and I accept that [my] sport’s credibility is on the line.’
Senior anti-doping bosses have been staggered anew at the revelations in Icarus. One senior anti-doping official who worked closely with London 2012 said: ‘For three years before the London Olympics people had been working hard to create a new test for human growth hormone which was put in place a few weeks before the Games.
‘It is astonishing and disheartening that other trusted anti-doping officials who were invited to the London lab were taking that information and using it to devise sophisticated doping programmes.’
Rodchenkov’s suicide attempt came in February 2011 after he was arrested and interrogated for alleged dealing in performance enhancing drugs. He believes a professional doping rival was behind his arrest.
The knife went deep into his chest and scraped his heart. He has a large scar on his chest today. His wife fou found him in the bath and he h had life-saving surgery be before being sent to one cc li ni cw here he was h heavily drugged for week, and a second where he recovered f from his depressive illnness. The second clinic, he says in Icarus, was‘ for sadists, the totally worst-of-the-worst criminals.’
He says he was respected by staff, who called him ‘professor.’
‘I got better,’ he says. ‘The most funny thing was they allowed me to use my computer, so I was working from the psychiatry clinic [still] like the head of the laboratory, advising the whole Russian national team [on doping matters]. At that time, I received from the International Olympic Committee an invitation to the 2012 Olympic Games, being the director [of the Moscow lab]. WADA said, “If it’s not Rodchenkov, then we don’t see in Russia any other candidate than him”.’
The invitation proved to be Rodchenkov’s get-out-of-jail card, literally. He says he convinced the Russian sports minister at the time, Vitaly Mutko, that going to London and visiting the 2012 Games lab would give him, and Russia, vital intelligence to allow them to cheat the system. He says in Icarus: ‘You can imagine how important information from the London laboratory is for the [Russian] national team.
‘I had information, what testing the London laboratory is doing... to understand how much [ Russia] is[ in] danger. Without this [information] all Russian doping situation will be collapsed. Thank God, Mutko understood this. I received a call from the Moscow investigators. “Grigory, your case is dropped”.’
Fogel is t aking Rodchenkov through his role in Russia’s doping programme at this point in the movie. He asks who took care of Rodchenkov’s release. He says: ‘Who got the charges dropped?’
Rodchenkov replies: ‘[Vladimir] Putin. Of course. It’s my redemption. Success in Sochi instead of being in prison.’ Rodchenkov duly went to London, helped to ‘sabotage’ those Games, and then returned to Russia to begin plotting how to dope a group of his nation’s best Winter Games athletes in Sochi.
And this all went ahead because an invite from the IOC to London got him back to work.