The Russian government operated “a state-dictated failsafe system” of doping in sport including at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, according to a World Anti-Doping Agency independent report released on Monday.
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The World Anti-Doping Agency had McLaren investigate allegations made by former Russian anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov in a May article in The New York Times.
The World Anti-Doping Agency swiftly called for the International Olympic Committee to consider a full ban of the Russian team from the Summer Olympics, which start August 5 in Rio de Janiero.
According to the report, the state-sponsored cheating happened after an “abysmal” medal count at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.
The investigation, chaired Richard McLaren, says that the Russian sports ministry “directed, controlled and oversaw” manipulation and tampering of urine samples provided by athletes.
Homing in on the Sochi Games – President Valdimir Putin’s chance to show the world that Russia was a sporting great just like old Soviet times – McLaren’s report states: “The FSB was intricately entwined in the scheme to allow Russian athletes to compete while dirty”. Given this latest report and charges of a cover-up, the pressure is only likely to build on banning Russian Federation entirely from the competition.
Russian track and field athletes are already subject to a suspension from the IAAF that prevents them from participating in Rio.
And to prove this allegation, McLaren sent a random amount of samples from “protected Russian athletes” at Sochi 2014 stored by the anti-doping laboratory in Lausanne to a lab in London to see if they had scratch marks around the necks of the bottles that would indicate they had been manipulated.
He claimed that up to 15 Russian medal winners at the Sochi Winter Games were part of a programme in which tainted urine samples were switched for clean ones.
U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun said in a statement that the report “confirms what we have stated previously: the current anti-doping system is broken and urgently requires the attention of everyone interested in protecting clean athletes”.
McLaren presented his findings in Toronto on Monday, concluding that Russia’s government, security services and sporting authorities colluded to hide doping across a range of sports.
A previous Mutko interview – conducted last September in Zurich for an earlier WADA report of doping cover-ups and corruption in Russian track and field – was “singularly unhelpful”, McLaren said Monday.
It read: “The findings of the McLaren Report are truly shocking”.
The report found Rodchenko, whose motives have been questioned by some, to be “a credible and truthful person”. “Now, the so-called doping scandals have come into play, attempts are being made to extend the sanctions for the exposed doping abuse cases to all, including “clean” athletes under the pretext of alleged protecting their interests”.
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Tuesday is a huge day for Russia’s Olympic status on two fronts in the IOC’s home city of Lausanne, Switzerland.
