Stepanov and his wife, banned athlete Yuliya Stepanova, appeared in a German television documentary claiming systematic doping in Russian athletics in 2014 – allegations later supported by an investigation by a World Anti-Doping Agency independent commission which found evidence of “state-sponsored” doping and widespread corruption.
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WADA spokesman Ben Nichols said before 2015, WADA didn’t have authority to conduct its own investigations, and officials didn’t think turning the information over to Russian investigators “would have led to the scrutiny required”.
Russia’s sports minister on Monday slammed claims that four Russian gold medallists at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were drug cheats as an attempt to derail upcoming World Anti-Doping Agency meetings.
The “60 Minutes” report did not identify the Russian athletes alleged to have won tainted gold medals.
Rodchenkov died in February, while reportedly planning to write a tell-all book about Russian doping.
Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko has dismissed as “speculation” claims that four Russian gold-medal winners at the Sochi Olympics used performance-enhancing drugs.
“It is obvious that someone wants to harm Russian sport”.
“All his so-called revelations are based on speculation”, he told TASS.
In the complete interview that aired Sunday, Stepanov said he had recorded more than 15 hours of conversations with Rodchenkov, who told him that officers of Russian Federation s FSB security service “tried to control every single step of the anti-doping process in Sochi”.
Russia’s track and field team is now suspended from worldwide competition, with three months to go before the opening of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In an interview aired on Sunday, Stepanov said Rodchenkov told him “that FSB agents worked as doping controls officers during the Sochi Games, that FSB tried to control every single step of the anti-doping process in Sochi”.
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The latest news “is a clear call for WADA to embrace the athletes’ demands for a broader investigation”, Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told The Associated Press. “Furthermore, a team of independent observers managed the doping control operations on a daily basis during the games”.
