Now, with less than three weeks until the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, officials must decide whether to let Russian athletes participate.
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The World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive board wants the International Olympic Committee to ban all Russian teams from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics following a report showing the scope and length of state-directed doping in the country.
The report also says that Russia’s Ministry of Sport “controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athlete’s analytical results or sample swapping” with the “active participation” of other government bodies, including the country’s security agency. “Therefore, the International Olympic Committee will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organization implicated”, President Thomas Bach said in a statement. WADA does not have the ability to ban athletes, but they can recommend that governing bodies take action.
WADA mandated McLaren to investigate allegations made by former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov in May.
Its findings have the potential to throw the Olympic movement into crisis, with world, American and Canadian anti-doping bodies calling for Russian Federation – which has already had its track and field and weightlifting athletes banned from competing in Rio – to be thrown out of the 2016 Olympics.
WADA was responding to a damning independent report produced by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren and published on Monday that revealed evidence of widespread state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
The WADA report said Nagornykh was told about every positive drug test across all sports from 2011 onwards, and it was he who decided “who would benefit from a cover-up and who would not be protected”. If all the operational precautions to promote and permit doping by Russian athletes proved to have been ineffective for whatever reason, the laboratory provided a fail-safe mechanism.
There was no mandate to find individual dope cheats or conclusions about people being forced to dope in the Russian program.
Russia’s track and field athletes are already banned from the Rio Olympics.
Those letters were written in anticipation of the sort of results McLaren delivered Monday – results that were previewed in a mostly overlooked section of the IAAF report, released in June, that called for the Russian track team’s ouster.
Rodchenkov, now living in the United States, had told how Russian secret service agents helped the operation to get Russian samples away from global inspectors at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. “The contents of this report were meant to be kept strictly confidential until publication”, the statement read. “Considering the above, FINA naturally expects the IOC to apply the principles and values shared by the Olympic Movement”.
USADA chief Travis Tygart said the report “concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, a mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government that goes right to the field of play”.
“The Moscow laboratory was operated for the protection of athletes doped with the complicity of the state, a cheating system that we have described as being contrary to good behavior”.
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He urged the worldwide community to come together to ensure that what he called an unprecedented level of criminality never threatens sports again.
