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Russia engaged in 'state-directed' Olympic doping, finds probe

By New Scientist and Press Association

18 July 2016

olympics

Urine samples were swapped at the Sochi anti-doping laboratory

PA

Is this the end of the road for Russia’s chances of going to Rio? A two-month investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency has uncovered evidence of “state-directed, fail-safe” doping throughout Russian Olympic sport.

The investigation’s chairman Richard McLaren delivered three main findings at a press conference in Toronto today – that doped samples “disappeared” from the anti-doping laboratory in Moscow, that they were swapped with clean samples at the laboratory for the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 and that these plans were directed by the Russian sports ministry.

McLaren said he had “unwavering confidence” in his findings, which will surely lead to even louder calls for Russia to be banned from the Rio Olympics.

This investigation was set up in May following an interview in the New York Times with the former director of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, in which he described an elaborate plan to ensure Russian success at Sochi 2014.

Rodchenkov, who was sacked after the first WADA-funded investigation into doping in Russian athletics last year, has been in hiding in the United States ever since and has been branded a “criminal” and a “traitor” by senior Russian figures.

Last month the agency released details of how some of the country’s sportspeople have avoided having their urine tested for banned drugs.

State cheating

But McLaren’s “intense” 57-day investigation has completely vindicated the remarkable tale of state-sponsored cheating that he outlined in print in May.

McLaren, who also worked on that initial investigation into Russian athletics, said his team had used forensic analysis, seized computers, studied data and performed extra tests on stored samples from the Sochi Games and other major events.

Rodchenkov, for example, had claimed that the Russian secret service (FSB) had worked out how to open and re-seal the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are used for storing urine samples so that the contents could be replaced with “clean” urine.

To prove this allegation, McLaren sent a random amount of samples from “protected Russian athletes” at Sochi 2014 stored by the anti-doping laboratory in Lausanne to a lab in London to see if they had scratch marks around the necks of the bottles that would indicate they had been manipulated.

McLaren said “100 per cent of the bottles had been scratched” although added that this would “not have been visible to the untrained eye”.

He said he had “unwavering confidence” in the 103-page report’s findings, having only included items that could be proven “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Read more: How gene tests and hair analysis could catch doping athletes

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