On Monday, McLaren presented his report, which found Russian Federation had a system in place – “directed and controlled” by the country’s Ministry of Sport – to cover up positive tests in a wide range of sports.
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After a poor showing by Russian athletes at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the pressure was on to win many more at the Sochi Games in 2014 – and the state-sponsored doping programme reached its zenith.
Mondays’ report agreed with earlier stories that said the Russian government, secret service and state-funded anti-doping operation let cheating athletes compete and win medals.
The International Olympic Committee has yet to take action, but IOC president Thomas Bach said, via Reuters, that McLaren’s report revealed a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games”.
New Zealand has long supported global calls for WADA to investigate serious allegations against nations who have failed to honestly implement the World Anti-Doping Code, but Mr Steel says there must also be consequences where serious wrongdoing is exposed.
World News – The World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive board wants the International Olympic Committee to ban all Russian teams from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Massive, state-sanctioned Russian doping scandal leads to calls for Russia to be banned from Rio Olympics. It included the 2013 track world championships in Moscow and was in place as recently as the 2015 swimming world championships in Kazan.
WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said: “Shamefully, the McLaren Report corroborates the allegations, exposing a modus operandi of serious manipulation of the doping control process in the satellite laboratory set up in Sochi for the 2014 Games; and, the Moscow laboratory since 2011 and after the Sochi Games”.
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 German Olympic body joined in the call for all Russian competitors to be excluded from the Rio Games next month. McLaren said his report was handed over to WADA on Saturday and had not been leaked in advance. The strategy that covered up hundreds of positive tests now has a name: The Disappearing Positive Methodology.
If all the operational precautions to promote and permit doping by Russian athletes proved to have been ineffective for whatever reason, the laboratory provided a fail-safe mechanism.
Wada does not have the authority to directly ban a country from the Olympics, but they can recommend sanctions to the IOC.
‘Therefore, the International Olympic Committee will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated’. 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.
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If anything, he said, it would be a benefit to the sports and the athletes.
