Kenya was plunged into crisis after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ruled at a meeting in Montreal that the African nation’s drug-testing body had breached strict global rules. With the Russian athletics squad already suspended and not certain to be reinstated before the Games, it could remove two powerful teams from the track in Rio. Wesley Korir, a member of the Kenyan Olympic marathon team and himself a lawmaker, blamed the government’s sports ministry officials for messing up the legislation.
Advertisement
The WADA ruling meant Kenya, for decades a leading power in middle- and long-distance running, could be in danger of exclusion from the August 5-21 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Russia’s deputy sports minister, Yury Nagornykh, told reporters: “Russian sport and the Russian Federation do not have any kind of doping programme and there has never been one, before or during the Olympic Games in Sochi”.
Two Russian winter sportsmen named as cheats by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former lab chief who has since fled to the United States, also denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were part of a campaign to besmirch the name of Russian sport. If any of them won a medal, their urine samples had to be substituted.
“The system of organization of the Olympic Games was completely transparent”, Mutko told TASS.
“I’m a person who has worked for many years in sport, competed at the Olympics, and I know how much responsibility each athlete bears when they compete at such a high level”.
Aleksander Zubkov, a veteran bobsledder, and Aleksander Legkov, a champion skier, said they were considering legal action against The Times for defamation. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, says Rodchenkov’s allegation that the government ordered up a performance-enhancing cocktail that blended alcohol with three different anabolic steroids, which was then served to numerous medal-winning athletes, was “absolutely groundless”.
“I wouldn’t put trust in such unfounded claims”, he added.
Kenya passed an act of parliament in April to criminalise doping, but WADA said on Thursday it needed to make changes to ensure compliance with the code, which sets a framework for consistent rules and policies around the world.
The allegations, along with a recommendation by the WADA foundation board to declare distance-running powerhouse Kenya non-compliant, and a French probe into payments around the election of the 2020 Games host city are casting a dark shadow over the Olympics 12 weeks ahead of opening ceremony in Rio.
Meanwhile, the IAFF has given Kenyan athletes the green light to compete at this year’s summer Rio Olympics despite the prevalence of doping cases in Kenya’s sports world and the inability of its dysfunctional drug-testing agency.
Putin personally backed Russia’s bid, even giving an emotional speech in English to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Advertisement
Rodchenkov claimed that Russian officials forced him to resign.
