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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A two-month investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency has uncovered evidence of “state-directed, fail-safe” doping throughout Russian Olympic sport.
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.
On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said officials named as directly responsible in the doping scheme would be suspended.
The International Olympic Committee could take the first sanctions against Russia on Tuesday over what IOC president Thomas Bach called “a shocking and unprecedented attack” on sport revealed in an investigation into Russian doping.
Russia’s track and field athletes are already banned from competing in the Olympics by the International Association of Athletics’ Federations over widespread doping in the sport.
“The McLaren Report confirms to the fullest extent the allegations that Russian Federation has been operating a state-sponsored doping regime and has done so for many years”.
McLaren’s investigative team chose 95 samples from lists of protected athletes, certain Russian medal winners stored in a Lausanne laboratory after the Sochi Games and from that pool selected 11 sample bottles.
With the Rio Olympics less than three weeks away, the International Olympic Committee has promised “the toughest sanctions available” after a report found Moscow had concealed hundreds of positive doping tests in many sports ahead of the Sochi winter Games.
His claims – many of which were supported by the report – were what led the WADA to recruit Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren to lead an investigation into the doping operation.
Rodchenkov said the doping programme was “working like a Swiss watch” at Sochi and helped at least 15 Russian medallists avoid doping detection. Defending Olympic champion Julius Brink says he was shocked by the scope of the cheating, but he still doesn’t think all Russian athletes should be punished by missing Rio. “Laboratory staff were under strict instructions to report all positive results to the Ministry of Sport whatever the circumstances”.
The 2016 Rio Olympics are set to begin on August 5.
Russia’s deputy minister of sports, Yuri Nagornykh, who was also part of Russia’s Olympic Committee, would direct workers at the Moscow lab of which positive samples to send through to be reported to WADA and which to hold back.
According to McLaren, Rodchenkov and all other witnesses interviewed were deemed credible and the personnel at the Moscow laboratory did not have a choice in whether to be involved in the state-directed system.
In Sochi, under global scrutiny for the 2014 Winter Olympics, such a system could not have worked.
“Today, so-called “doping scandals” are the method used, attempts to apply sanctions for detected cases of doping to all athletes, including those who are “clean”, supposedly to protect their interests”.
“Another notable finding within the (McLaren) report is the role that one of FIFA’s executive committee members, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, played within the system”, said a WADA statement.
And the reports last November of 1,400 stored samples in Moscow destroyed to deny them to WADA investigators?
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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”.
