Tampered-with bottles could only be detected with microscopic examination, but McLaren said the same type of bottle could safely be used at the 2016 Games now that doping officials are aware of the tactic.
Advertisement
Scott’s reference to “technicalities” not being allowed to “circumvent appropriate sanctions” was surely aimed at International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach, who has previously been reluctant to discuss collective punishments for Russian Federation. “Therefore, the International Olympic Committee will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated”. CAS was hearing Russia’s appeal on Tuesday against the ban on its athletics team.
WADA’s report into the scandal calls on Russia’s track and field team to be banned from worldwide competition, including from the 2016 Rio Olympics, until “state-sponsored” doping is eradicated.
McLaren was asked to compile the report after the New York Times printed an interview in May with the former director of the Moscow lab, Grigory Rodchenkov.
It puts the International Olympic Committee in the position of ruling against against one of its biggest supporters, a nation that spent more than $50 billion hosting the Winter Games in Sochi just two years ago.
“We feel a little bit vindicated today because we have been calling for this report since last November when the first allegations of doping in Russian Federation surfaced”, Scott said on a conference call.
A scathing report outlining a state-sanctioned doping system in Russian Federation prompted immediate calls for the nation’s entire team to be sidelined from the Summer Games, raising the possibility that the Olympics could go on without a sports superpower for the first time since the 1980s.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is holding emergency talks today to decide Russia’s status for the Rio Olympics after an investigation found rampant state-run doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games and other events.
“The State implemented a simple failsafe strategy”, it said.
Rodchenkov said he discussed a response to a German television documentary previous year on doping in Russian athletics with Mutko.
That same evening, the report says, Blokhin arranged for other FSB agents to enter the laboratory.
Star hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser, a member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, felt “a lot of vindication” from the report’s release.
When this was not enough to hide doping – such as at an global event like Sochi 2014 – positive urine samples were switched with clean ones from a freezer through a “mouse hole”, with FSB agents on hand in the Sochi laboratory disguised as maintenance workers.
It included the 2013 track world championships in Moscow and was in place as recently as the 2015 swimming world championships in Kazan.
The investigations showed that caps had been removed from a number of samples, and that they contained unusually high levels of salt, “significantly exceeding the levels produced by the human body”.
“It was a simple but effective and efficient method for the Deputy Minister of Sport, Yuri Nagornykh, to force the lab to report any positive finding as a negative result”, explained McLaren.
WADA president Craig Reedie demanded that the Russian government sack all sports ministry officials “implicated” by the McLaren report, but did not name any individuals.
Rodchenkov told the inquiry that in meetings with deputy minister Nagornykh on the doping cover-up, “Nagornykh told him that Minister of Sport Mutko was aware of everything that they were discussing”.
The strength of feeling was clear in comments made after Russia’s much-vaunted hockey team were thrashed 7-3 by Canada in the quarter-finals.
Harking back to the tit-for-tat superpower boycotts of the 1980s, he said: “The Olympic movement. may again be on the verge of a split”.
The agency has urged a full ban of the Russian team from the Rio games, which begin in 17 days.
Advertisement
An editorial in Spain’s El Mundo backed a Rio ban – “State doping in Russian Federation deserves an exemplary punishment” it wrote.
