WADA: Russia should be banned from Rio Olympics 2016
THE World Anti-Doping Agency has called for Russia to be banned from the Rio Olympics after finding the country used a state-sponsored doping scheme.
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THE International Olympic Committee has promised “the toughest sanctions available” after a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report found Russia had concealed the positive doping tests of athletes in the run-up to the Sochi Winter games.
The IOC did not spell out whether it would heed growing calls for Olympic bans already imposed on Russia’s track and field athletes and weightlifters to be extended to all its competitors in Rio.
McLaren confirms laboratory operated as part of a state sponsored program - calls it the "disappearing positive" method.
— WADA (@wada_ama) July 18, 2016
But IOC President Thomas Bach said the independent WADA investigation had revealed “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games”.
“Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated.” WADA has urged the IOC to consider banning Russia from the Rio Olympics altogether.
The WADA-backed report confirmed allegations made by former Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory head Grigory Rodchenkov, who two months ago told the New York Times that dozens of Russians used performance-enhancing drugs in Sochi with approval from national sports authorities.
It said the catalyst for the development of a system to conceal widespread doping had been Russia’s performance at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, where a country that cherishes its status as a sporting superpower finished 11th, with only three gold medals.
“The surprise result of the Sochi investigation was the revelation of the extent of State oversight and directed control of the Moscow Laboratory in processing and covering up urine samples of Russian athletes from virtually all sports before and after the Sochi Games,” said the report, unveiled in Toronto.
The report was led by Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren, who had sat on the independent commission that last year exposed widespread doping and corruption in Russian track and field, leading to its exclusion from international competition.
He said Russia’s Sports Ministry had overseen the manipulation of athletes’ analytical results for years before Sochi.
“The State implemented a simple failsafe strategy,” the report said.
“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 failsafe mechanism.
“The State had the ability to transform a positive analytical result into a negative one by ordering that the analytical process of the Moscow Laboratory be altered.” In Sochi itself, where international observers were scrutinising the drug tests, positive results could not simply be brushed away, so a system of sample-swapping was put in place with the help of the FSB intelligence service, the report said.
Rodchenkov had spoken of a clandestine night-time operation in which he said staff secretly took urine samples from the lab via a “mouse hole” cut into a wall, and replaced them with clean samples taken from the same athlete months earlier and sometimes manipulated.
McLaren said Rodchenkov and all other witnesses interviewed had been deemed credible, and the report said the investigators “confirm the general veracity of the published information concerning the sample swapping that went on at the Sochi Laboratory during the Sochi Games”.
Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, who was mentioned 21 times in McLaren’s 97-page report, was not immediately available for comment.
RUSSIA CONDEMNS ‘DANGEROUS INTERFERENCE’ IN SPORT
The Kremlin on Monday condemned what it called a “dangerous” return to political interference in sport after WADA called for Russia to be banned from the Rio Olympics.
Referring to an international boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the Kremlin said in a statement that “now we are seeing a dangerous recurrence of interference of politics in sport.
“Yes, the forms of such interference have changed, but the aim is the same as before: to make sport an instrument of geopolitical pressure.”
Originally published as WADA: Russia should be banned from Rio Olympics 2016
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