On Monday, the executive board of the World Anti-Doping Agency called for all Russian teams to be banned from next month’s Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
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The US Anti-Doping Agency condemned the “mind-blowing level of corruption” unearthed by the report, which was commissioned following claims made by a Russian whistleblower.
The report is an embarrassment for Putin, who personally oversaw preparations for the US$50 billion games in Sochi the most expensive in Olympic history.
The Kremlin rubbished a report for WADA that laid bare Russian state-run doping in sport, saying the findings were based exclusively on the testimony of a former official wanted in Moscow.
But McLaren said the cheating in Sochi was a one-shot deal.
“FIG is concerned about the increasing number of officials asking for a blanket ban of Russian athletes to participate at the forthcoming Olympic Games in Rio”, the sport’s governing body said in a statement.
“For the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the FIFA Confederations Cup 2017, as for all FIFA competitions, FIFA will be in charge of the anti-doping program, ensuring the highest standards, including the latest science and recommendations by WADA”, FIFA said in a statement.
IOC President Thomas Bach called the revelations a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games” and said the IOC wouldn’t hesitate to apply the toughest sanctions available against those accused of cheating.
The investigator, Richard McLaren, dubbed Russia’s program the “disappearing positive methodology”. This can only be achieved through the collective sanctioning (of athletes, officials and organisations) that has been recommended.
“At a minimum, Russian (Anti-Doping Agency) RUSADA’s return to compliance can not be considered until all persons from the Russian Ministry of Sport and other government departments and agencies that are implicated by the report, including RUSADA, are dismissed from their roles”, Reedie said.
Doping failures by athletes at the 2013 World athletics championships in Moscow were swapped before being sent on for testing by the sport’s ruling body the IAAF, according to the report. Assisting the plan was Russia’s national security service – the FSB, the current version of the Soviet Union’s KGB.
He was relying on the IOC and worldwide sports federations to figure out appropriate sanctions.
That urgent verdict is scheduled for Thursday but could be rendered meaningless by an International Olympic Committee blanket ban.
Time is crucial because the Olympics begin August 5, and decisions about Russia’s participation in Rio must be made.
The lab’s role as the “failsafe mechanism” was central to Monday’s report, enabling the Russian state to “transform a positive analytical result into a negative one”.
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”.
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McLaren said he was “unwaveringly confident” in his report, and insisted there was no leak, as several sports leaders suggested over the weekend, when draft letters calling for Russia’s ban were leaked to the media.
