Rodchenkov, who was awarded a presidential order after the Sochi games, was later forced to resign and has since fled to the United States.
Advertisement
Schneider said: “I’m sure Tretyakov was clean”. “They are not substantiated by any trustworthy data, they are not backed by any documents”.
The International Olympic Committee called on WADA to investigate the claims.
“As far as the Russian anti-doping agency is concerned, I think it highly unlikely that that organisation would be compliant by the time of the games in Rio”, WADA President Craig Reedie told BBC radio in an interview on Saturday. For quite some time, Kenya is repeatedly pressured by WADA to crack down on doping practices by some athletes just to get ahead in sports.
Russian anti-doping experts and members of the intelligence services secretly broke into tamper-proof bottles to replace urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, the New York Times reported.
Each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.
But Dr. Rodchenkov told the Times that Russian officials took the program to the next level in Sochi due to their home-country advantage.
Zubkov and Legkov later threatened to sue Rodchenkov for defamation, with Zubkov calling the accusations “simply lunacy”.
Aleksandr Zubkov, a bobsledder who won two golds, told the Russian sports daily that the claims were “complete slander against the athletes of the Russian team and against me as an individual”. They recognized that they would have more access to (and knowledge of) the laboratories in Sochi where urine samples would be tested for doping, and therefore had an ability to artificially increase their medal count after a disappointing showing at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
Mutko suggested on Saturday that, instead of Russian Federation, the International Olympic Committee and WADA should be facing questions over Rodchenkov’s allegations.
He headed Russia’s anti-doping laboratory from 2006 to November 2015 when he resigned after WADA accused the laboratory of being part of a state-sponsored doping programme.
Gold and silver medalist at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia’s cross country skier Alexander Legkov speaks during a press conference on May 13, 2016, in Moscow.
Increasingly likely: that they’ve been robbed by a country that back in 2009 was already being warned that its athletes risked dying from the abuse of banned blood-boosting drugs and transfusions; a country where entire sports – race-walking being the prime example – are unbelievable; a country that in 2014 had more doping violations, 148 in 22 sports, than any other; a country that WADA figures show still isn’t playing ball with global efforts to drug-test its athletes.
The Kremlin has emphatically dismissed allegations of a sophisticated Russian doping programme at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Advertisement
Russian athletes have also come under scrutiny after testing positive for using the recently banned drug meldonium.
