WADA was responding to a damning independent report published yesterday that revealed further evidence of widespread state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
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The report, known as the McLaren report after the investigator who led it, concludes that a Moscow lab was the last-resort “failsafe” that would make sure an initial positive test result disappeared if all other steps failed.
Russia’s track and field team have already been suspended from the Olympics, and the IOC’s executive board will meet today to discuss these WADA findings.
It has also called on football’s world governing FIFA to investigate Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko’s involvement in the elaborate doping scam, as Mutko is also the president of the Russian FA, a member of FIFA’s council and the chairman of the organising committee for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
“I hope that the International Olympic Committee, while taking up a decision, will be guided by common sense and will proceed from the fact that there is no a concrete confirmation of a violation by this or that athlete in the report”, he was quoted as saying.
– The Ministry of Sport made the determination as to which athletes would be protected.
The rest of the plan involved smuggling Russian samples out of the Sochi laboratory through a hole in the wall, an FSB agent taking the caps of the bottles off and Rodchenkov refilling them with urine supplied by the athletes when they knew they were clean. The damning report will fuel calls for a complete ban on Russian Federation from the 2016 Summer Olympics, which gets under way in Rio de Janeiro on the 5th of next month.
In a leaked letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) the officials from the United States and Canadian anti-doping agencies call for a complete ban on Russians if the Sochi report compiled by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren is damning.
The CAS will rule on whether the IAAF had grounds to impose a blanket ban on a national federation, since such a suspension inevitably punished athletes with no positive drug test on their record.
Because the Sochi Games are so tainted, the IOC said it would not give backing to any worldwide sports events in Russian Federation.
– Russian athletes from the vast majority of summer and winter Olympic sports benefited from the system.
This includes world championships and World Cups, the International Olympic Committee said, calling for winter federations “to actively look for alternative organisers”.
Rodchenkov is now in hiding in the United States and is wanted by Russian Federation.
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Grigory Rodchenkov’s claim that he doped dozens of athletes before the Games.
