Russia operated a huge state sponsored doping programme that sabotaged the London 2012 Olympics and should be banned from athletics, according to a damning report by the World Anti Doping Agency.
The 325-page review by an independent commission chaired by Dick Pound, a former Wada president, uncovered a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” and recommended that Russia be suspended from competition and barred from the Olympic Games in Rio next year unless it entirely overhauls its approach.
The International Association of Athletics Federations, where senior officials including former president Lamine Diack were last week arrested by French prosecutors, also came in for heavy criticism as the report found “corruption and bribery practices at the highest levels of international athletics”.
Sebastian Coe, who took over from Diack in August after serving as a vice-president for seven years, said he had started the process of examining what sanctions should be taken against Russia.
Pound said the “very damaging” findings, which were redolent of an “inherited attitude from the old Cold War days”, were probably the tip of the iceberg and extended to other countries and other sports.
“For 2016, our recommendation is the Russian federation be suspended. One of our hopes is that they will volunteer to undertake the remedial work so Russian athletes can compete under a new framework,” said Pound.
“If they don’t it has to play itself out and the outcome may be that there are no Russian track and field athletes in Rio.”
Following an 11-month review forced by revelations in an ARD documentary in Germany, Pound’s commission found evidence of “interference with doping controls up to middle of this year” as well as “cover ups, destruction of samples [and] payment of money to conceal doping tests”.
It found that the head of the Moscow lab, Grigory Rodchenko, admitted to intentionally destroying 1,417 samples in December 2014 shortly before Wada officials were due to visit.
The report found the London 2012 Olympics were “sabotaged” by the “widespread inaction” against Russian athletes with suspicious doping profiles by the world athletics governing body and the Russian federation.
It outlines a culture of cheating in which Russian coaches were “out of control” and expected the anti-doping agency to protect their athletes rather than catch them. Athletes were left with little choice but to participate in doping programmes if they wanted to make the team.
The report recommended that five middle-distance runners and five coaches be given lifetime doping bans. Two of the athlete were the gold and bronze-medal winners in the 800 metres in 2012, the Olympic champion Mariya Savinova and the bronze medalist Ekaterina Poistogova.
Pound said it was inconceivable that the Russian sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, was not aware of the scale of the problem. “It was impossible for him not to be aware of it. And if he’s aware of it, he’s complicit in it,” he said.
“It would be naive in the extreme to conclude that activities on the scale discovered could have occurred without the explicit or tacit approval of Russian governmental authorities,” the report concludes.
Mutko, who leads the 2018 football World Cup organising committee, denied wrongdoing to the Wada inquiry panel, including any knowledge of athletes being blackmailed.
The Wada report said the Russian anti-doping agency was under improper influence from Mutko’s ministry, that it had given athletes advance notice of tests and that its employees “routinely” took bribes from athletes to cover up doping.
Mutko told the Interfax news agency that “if we have to close this whole system, we would be happy to close it” because “we will only save money.” That would mean no funding for the Russian anti-doping agency or laboratory, he added.
Mutko also said Russia was being persecuted over doping, saying “whatever we do, everything is bad.” On Monday night, Russian officials were painting the report as a “political hit job”. Recent corruption allegations levelled at Fifa have also been described as an attempt to undermine the 2018 World Cup.
Pound’s report said a number of Russian athletes suspected of doping could have been prevented from competing in 2012 had it not been for “the collective and inexplicable laissez-faire policy” adopted by the IAAF and the Russian federation.
Russia finished fourth in the medal table in London and one year later came top of the medal table at the world athletics championships in Moscow, the first in a run of major sporting events in Russia that includes the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup.
There could yet be worse to come for the IAAF. Pound said he was holding back parts of the report pending the French investigation into IAAF officials, which was kickstarted when the independent commissioned handed documents to Interpol, but hoped to release more details by the end of the year.
French police last week arrested Diack, the IAAF legal adviser Habib Cissé and Gabriel Dollé, the former longstanding head of the IAAF’s anti-doping unit.
Prosecutors said they would have arrested Diack’s son and former IAAF marketing consultant, Papa Massata Diack, if he had been in France at the time.
Diack, the IAAF president for 16 years, is accused by French police of accepting more than €1m in exchange for covering up positive drug tests.
Wada’s foundation board will meet next week in Colorado Springs and has been urged to declare the Russian laboratory and anti-doping agency non-compliant. Pound said the IAAF should stop Russia from competing until it was completely rehabilitated.
“That is your nuclear weapon. Either get this done or you are not going to Rio. The idea is to get people competing under the right conditions,” said Pound.
Lord Coe, the IAAF president, said on Sunday that he was minded to try and rehabilitate Russia within the system but would “never say never” when it came to suspending a country.
On Monday Coe, also under pressure over his fulsome tributes to Diack on taking over in August, appeared to have made a u-turn as he called the report “alarming” and said he had started the process of considering sanctions.
“We need time to properly digest and understand the detailed findings included in the report. However, I have urged the Council to start the process of considering sanctions against ARAF. This step has not been taken lightly,” he said.
“Our athletes, partners and fans have my total assurance that where there are failures in our governance or our anti-doping programmes we will fix them.”
The Russian sports ministry said that it had already taken steps to overhaul its athletics federation under a new president and coaches. “Russia has been and will continue to be fully committed to the fight against doping in sport,” it said.