If Russia’s Olympic committee is banned from entering any teams for Rio, it would likely be allowed to appeal that decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
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With the start of the 2016 Olympic Games just a month away, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released further evidence today of Russia’s widespread, state-sponsored doping as a potential call to action for sport governing bodies to ban Russian Federation entirely from competing in Rio.
WADA’s president, Craig Reedie, is also an IOC vice president who will take part in the scheduled conference call requested by IOC President Thomas Bach.
The anti-doping watchdog also calls on world governing bodies of sports implicated in the inquiry report to consider action against Russian national bodies.
“The IOC must respond decisively to the findings in the report – the future integrity of sport depends on it”, it said.
The Sochi laboratory meanwhile “operated a unique (urine) sample swapping methodology to enable doped Russian athletes to compete at the (2014 Winter) Games”, it said. “The McLaren report makes it ever more clear that such culture change needs to be cascaded from the very top in order to deliver the necessary reform that clean sport needs”.
The investigator, Richard McLaren says it is inconceivable that Russian Sports Minister was unaware of the efforts to hide positive doping results for athletes.
The report said Russia’s Sports Ministry had overseen the manipulation of athletes’ analytical results for years before Sochi.
In May, the New York Times and 60 Minutes first reported on the doping scheme after scoring interviews with Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of Russia’s anti-doping lab in Moscow, and Vitaly Stepanov, who once worked with the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.
The report said Nagornykh had been advised of every positive test across all sports from 2011 onwards and decided “who would benefit from a cover-up and who would not be protected”. The report confirmed previous whisperings that the Russian government was involved with the coordination and execution of doping during the Sochi Games, but it also included another tidbit: The doping operation had been going on “before and after” the Games, as well. Rodchenkov said an intricate doping program was “working like a Swiss watch” at Sochi and helped at least 15 Russian medalists by making positive samples vanish and removing and re-sealing some samples.
Some of the world’s best athletes will be participating in the Olympics in Rio this summer.
The WADA report found evidence that the state was actively involved in ensuring that its athletes were not caught doping, ensuring that samples positive for banned substances would go missing.
McLaren said Rodchenkov’s statements were corroborated by forensic analysis, adding: “I’m confident that within the context of my mandate he was telling me the truth”. In 2014, a German documentary led WADA to recommend banning Russia’s track and field athletes.
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Speaking on tonight’s Off The Ball, chief sports reporter for The Times Martyn Ziegler gave some information about how these tests were tampered with.
