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Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation

The officials ended their long denial, but insisted the state had no role in the doping and it was not responsible for the institutionalized cheating.

www.nytimes.com|Rebecca R. Ruiz

Over several days of interviews here with The New York Times, the Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national antidoping agency, said of years’ worth of cheating schemes.

A lab director tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs, corrupting some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. Members of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B., broke into sample bottles holding urine. And a deputy sports minister for years ordered cover-ups of top athletes’ use of banned substances.

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Dr Richard McLaren: “the system was set up following the 2010 Winter Olympics, and was in place until 2014. It allowed the transformation of a positive result to a negative one, overseen by the Deputy Minister of Sport. The Ministry of Sport, Rusada and the FSB were involved in this process”.

An investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) says Russia's sports ministry "directed, controlled and oversaw" manipulation of urine samples provided by its athletes.

It says Russian athletes benefited from what the report called the "Disappearing Positive Methodology", whereby positive doping samples would go missing.

Grigory Rodchenkov claimed he doped dozens of athletes before the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi, Russia.

Rodchenkov - described by the Kremlin as a "scandalous" former official - also alleged he had been helped by the Russian secret service, the FSB.

He claimed they had worked out how to open and reseal supposedly tamper-proof bottles that were used for storing urine samples so the contents could be replaced with "clean" urine.

McLaren sent a random amount of stored samples from "protected Russian athletes" at Sochi 2014 to an anti-doping laboratory 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% of the bottles had been scratched" but added that would "not have been visible to the untrained eye".

The claims

• Russia decided to cheat following the "very abysmal" medal count of 15 at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
• It began making positive drug tests disappear from its anti-doping laboratories in late 2011
• Before the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia created a storage bank of clean, frozen urine
• Russia's security service, the FSB, worked in a building next to the Sochi laboratory, swapping positive urine samples for clean negative ones through a "mouse hole", adding table salt to make them weigh the same
• A key FSB agent had access to the Sochi anti-doping laboratory, disguised as a sewage and plumbing contractor
• But, in swapping urine samples, the FSB agents left miniscule tool marks on the bottles - later found by McLaren's investigators using a microscope
• The Moscow laboratory destroyed 8,000 samples it held dated prior to 10 September 2014