Explosive memo to KGB claims IOC ‘did not want drug samples retested... to avoid scandals’
RUSSIA wanted to use state security agents from the former KGB to attempt to influence key international figures in the anti-doping movement to prevent their systematic drug taking from being exposed.
An extraordinary memo drawn up in January 2015 by whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, previously the head of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory and a key figure orchestrating doping in Russia but who is now in FBI witness protection in the US, reveals the huge concerns Russian authorities had that they were about to be exposed as serial cheats by reports commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Rodchenkov wrote to Russia’s national state security operatives, the FSB — the successors to the KGB — outlining the problems which would result from a call to retest stored doping samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2012 London Olympics, which he warned would result in scores of Russian Olympians being exposed. The memo suggests that:
Rodchenkov believed that neither the International Olympic Committee (IOC) nor the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) wanted the samples retested as they wanted to avoid ‘scandals’.
The ‘West’ had known about Russian doping for years and tried to ‘smooth over the situation amicably’ and ‘politely tolerated it’.
Martial Saugy, who now advises FIFA on anti-doping but was then head of the internationally renowned laboratory in Lausanne which would work on the IOC and IAAF re-testing programme, was ‘well related to Russia’.
Russian secret service agents from the FSB might be able to discover when the retesting programme would start and who would be targeted.
Rodchenkov wrote the memo shortly after former WADA president Dick Pound had started investigating claims of corruption in Russian sport, his report having been commissioned following The Mail on Sunday’s expose in 2013 on the corruption of Rodchenkov’s laboratory in Moscow and a TV documentary by ARD in Germany. It led to a call for samples stored in Lausanne — kept frozen for eight years after Olympic Games — to be retested.
In a translation of the memo, which was made available to Richard McLaren’s WADA Independent Commission but was not included in the final version, Rodchenkov writes: ‘Of particular danger are those samples of urine and blood from the last Olympics stored in the basement laboratory at the University of Lausanne. If you now reanalysed with the help of new instruments, Beijing samples — it will be a disaster... Neither the IAAF or IOC wants opening of the trial and the subsequent scandals but the German broadcaster ARD oversees this process...’
Rodchenkov comes up with a series of proposals. He writes: ‘Suggestion: start working with Lausanne laboratory, Prof Martial Saugy is still working as director and is very well related to Russia. He and his five employees worked in the Sochi Winter Olympics and gave a positive interview about our work.
‘In his laboratory in Lausanne he stores 20,000 samples from the Olympic Games since 2000... you need to know exactly when to start reanalysis who determines the list of samples (sports and disciplines, countries, specific persons) and what type of analysis will be carried out...’
Saugy, who has since left his position at the Lausanne lab, is now an anti-doping adviser to FIFA, who have their own Russian drugs scandal, with 34 footballers ‘of interest’ to the anti-doping authorities. Last week Saugy emailed to say: ‘I am not in a position to make any comment on an ongoing investigation, where I can be called as a witness.’
Rodchenkov also indicates Russian authorities have friends in the ‘West’ who have known about and tolerated Russian doping for years. He claims former IAAF treasurer Valentin Balakhnichev, a Russian banned for life from the IAAF last year for facilitating a £345,000 bribe to cover up doping, had been warned. Rodchenkov writes: ‘[This] is not the machinations of the West, Westerners themselves as best they could have tried to smooth over the situation amicably and confidentially warned Balakhnichev for many years and politely tolerated it.’
But the IOC said: ‘Following an intelligence-gathering process that started in August 2015, the IOC put special measures in place, including targeted pre-tests and the reanalysis of stored samples from the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 and London 2012.’
They said they had started some of the reanalysis in 2009 and had retested all Russian samples from the three Games between 2010-2014 and found 101 positives, 37 from Russia.
Since the memo was written, ex-IAAF president Lamine Diack has been banned for life after being arrested by French police in relation to bribes paid to cover up Russian doping and been replaced by Lord Coe.
The IAAF said: ‘We take these allegations extremely seriously. We continue to work closely and in full cooperation with the ongoing French police investigation into members of the former IAAF regime and the anti-doping processes surrounding Russia. The whole system failed the athletes, not just in Russia but around the world.’
The IAAF has suspended Russia from the sport and initiated 116 doping cases against Russian athletes and coaches and is working with the IOC to identify further Russian samples for reanalysis.
The Lausanne laboratory did not wish to comment.