The International Olympic Committee said the World Anti- Doping Agency’s independent report would be “carefully” studied and “provisional measures and sanctions” could be decided when IOC members hold an emergency telephone conference on Tuesday.
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That response came after Richard McLaren, who had been tasked by WADA in May to investigate claims of doping and cover-ups at the Sochi Olympics, released his report on Monday.
On what the Russian press called Black Monday, Wada called for a complete ban on the country’s athletes and government officials from both the Olympics and Paralympics.
McLaren described two separate state-run systems designed not to register a positive doping test, one for “normal” operations out of the Russian national anti-doping laboratories in Moscow, and another able to hoodwink worldwide officials also present for doping tests during the 2014 Games in the Russian resort.
The report alleged an additional 11 positive tests of Russian soccer players were made to disappear in the state-sponsored doping program from late 2011 to 2015.
Chief investigator McLaren was appointed by WADA in May following allegations made by Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the WADA-accredited Moscow laboratory, who claimed he had covered up positive doping samples from Russian athletes in Sochi with the aid of the national security services. 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.
He described this system as a “simple, effective, efficient method for deputy minister of sport Yuri Nagornykh to report any positive as a negative result”. “To ban Russian Federation from the Rio Games would be an unprecedented step, but there is no appropriate alternative response to the conclusions in the report”, Mr Steel says.
“As hard as it is, by not enacting the recommendation from WADA (to ban Russia), they risk, we risk very much reducing the credibility of the movement, of the organization and of Olympic sport”, said Adam Pengilly, who is on the WADA and IOC athlete committees.
Russian President Vladimir Putin staked his reputation on the Sochi Games, which at around $US50 billion ($66 billion) was the most expensive in Olympic history.
He insisted there was no leak of his report, as several sports organizations suggested over the weekend, when draft letters calling for Russia’s ban were leaked to the media.
McLaren also insisted that he was “supremely confident” in the findings of the inquiry event though “we’ve had a very intense 57 days”.
“The current anti-doping system is broken and urgently requires the attention of everyone interested in protecting clean athletes, ‘” he said.
‘The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games, ‘ IOC President Thomas Bach said.
The report is full of such details, painting a picture of a sporting culture unable or unwilling to accept that athletes can compete clean, and sports officials completely shameless in their lip service to global anti-doping rules.
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Read the full New York Times report here. His team was charged by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to “determine the true facts” of the case, but nothing more, the lawyer said. “Blanket bans have never been and will never be just”.
