Russian doping cover-up was run from Sports Ministry

Russia faces an Olympics ban after exposure of its systematic drug cheating.

Russia’s national drug testing laboratory in Moscow routinely concealed positive tests.

The men and women who worked at the Moscow lab held no illusions about their jobs. On paper, the lab was accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency to detect the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes. In practice, it was at the centre of a state-sponsored and directed mission to ensure cheating Russian athletes never got caught.

Riding orders came straight from Russia’s Sports Ministry; regularly from Deputy Sports Minister Yury Nagornykh and sometimes from his boss, Vitaly Mutko.

These were the men who decided, in cahoots with Russia’s top coaches and sports officials, when a positive test needed to disappear. When all else failed, the Moscow lab was there to make sure Russia’s best medal chances didn’t.

The system, revealed in jaw-dropping detail by a WADA-commissioned report that has renewed calls to ban Russia entirely from next month’s Rio Olympics, was ingeniously simple.

Whenever a sample analysed by the Moscow lab indicated the presence of a banned substance, the lab technicians would immediately stop work. The next call would be to a designated “liaison’’ who had a direct line to the minister. One of the liaisons used by the lab was Natalia Zhelanova, an adviser to Nagornykh.

GRAPHIC: Russian doping exposed

The lab technicians didn’t know which athletes had provided the samples. What information they did have — the sex of the athlete, the relevant sport, the sample bottle number, date and place of the drug test — they passed on to the liaison.

Armed with this sketchy profile, the liaison would then contact the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) to determine the identity of the athlete. Once a positive ID was made, the file was sent to Nagornykh for determination.

Like Caesar at the Coliseum, Nagornykh would decide the fate of the cheating athlete. Instead of giving a thumbs up or thumbs down, he would issue one of two coded commands that went back to the lab.

If the athlete was good enough to win a world championship or Olympic medal, or young and talented enough to be considered a future champion, Nagornykh would send a “save’’ order. If they weren’t good enough or not Russian, the deputy minister would send a “quarantine’’ order.

Back at the lab, the technicians knew what to do when a “save” order came down the line. They manipulated the lab computer system to remove all in-house traces of the positive test and recorded it as a negative test in the database used by WADA.

The lab technicians never found out the identity of the athlete they had covered for, and the athlete, mostly likely oblivious to the entire episode, would remain free to continue taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Samples with “quarantine” orders would be properly analysed and reported as potential anti-doping violations so that, as far as anyone outside Moscow could tell, it looked as though the lab was doing WADA’s work, on the side of the anti-doping angels.  The WADA-commissioned report, compiled by a team led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, describes the Moscow lab as the “vital cog’’ in a state-run machine that involved Russia’s Ministry of Sport, RUSADA, the euphemistically named Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia (CSP) and the Federal Security Service, Russia’s peak spy agency, which replaced the KGB.

Put simply, the lab formed part of a powerful state apparatus responsible for manufacturing sporting success.

“The Moscow laboratory was not staffed with personnel who behaved in a rogue fashion for their own financial gain,’’ the report finds.

“Quite to the contrary, the laboratory personnel were not permitted to act independently of any instructions that were funnelled down to them from the Ministry of Sport.

“The Moscow laboratory was effectively caught in the jaws of a vice. It was a key player in the successful operation of a state-­imposed and rigorously controlled program which was overall ­managed and dictated by the (ministry).’’

By McLaren’s own admission, his investigations so far have merely “skimmed the surface’’ of a data cache retrieved from within Russia’s doping system by Grigory Rodchenkov, a former director of the Moscow lab.

It was Rodchenkov who earlier this year blew the whistle on an elaborate doping scam carried out at the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi.

The weakness of the report is its reliance on Rodchenkov, who fled Russia after allegations of widespread doping were raised by whistleblower athletes, as well as the failure of McLaren’s investigators to talk to athletes and sports officials living in Russia and anyone from the Sports Ministry. Its strength is the amount of corroborating evidence already uncovered which supports Rodchenkov’s central claims.

The Sochi scandal, documented by Rodchenkov and first reported by The New York Times in May, involved the systematic swapping of “dirty’’ samples provided by Russian athletes at the Games with clean ones frozen and stored, ahead of time, at the CSP.

In the dead of night, while athletes and Olympic officials were sleeping, dirty samples were passed through a “mouse hole’’ from the Sochi drugs lab to an adjacent aliquoting room, where Rodchenkov and his moonlight helpers reopened so-called tamper-proof sample bottles, emptied them and refilled them with clean urine.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Sochi story was the role of the FSB. According to Rodchenkov, the security service gave critical support to Russia’s doping effort.

At Sochi, the FSB maintained an office on the same floor of a building as the lab director, the International Olympic Committee and WADA. It was here that FSB agent Evgeny Blokhin slept during the day. At night, he supervised the delicate reopening of sealed sample bottles.

Under the cover of being a sewer engineer employed by a contracting company, Blokhin had security clearance to enter the Sochi lab after hours. He did so every night, without arousing suspicion, right under the noses of WADA and the IOC. Rodchenkov told investigators that for the purpose of the Sochi doping program, he was made an FSB agent, codenamed Kuts. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and head of the FSB, would have been proud.

In late 2014, when the ministry learned that WADA planned to inspect the Moscow lab, Nagornykh called in the “magicians’’ from FSB to make tainted samples disappear. Agent Blokhin again supervised the operation of swapping urine with clean samples. In some instances, the density of the replaced samples was adjusted by adding salt or diluting with water.

The McLaren investigation found that sample bottles retrieved from Moscow, once examined under a microscope, carried scratch marks and other telltale signs of tampering. The contents of “clean samples’’ stored in the bottles, once analysed, lent empirical weight to Rodchenkov’s claims. Some samples did not match the DNA of the athletes to whom they supposedly belonged. Others contained concentrations of salt “significantly exceeding the levels produced by the human body, absent a serious life-threatening medical condition”.

The implications of the 100-page McLaren report stretch from the sterile steel benches of the Moscow and Sochi labs deep into the Kremlin and plush inner circle of President Putin’s most trusted political allies. Mutko, the man ultimately responsible for Russia’s state-directed doping regime, has known Putin since the dying days of the Soviet Union, when both were working in local politics in Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg. It was Putin, as prime minister, who handpicked Mutko to lead his Sports Ministry in 2008, when Russia began its preparations for Sochi. Putin is heavily invested in Russia’s re-emergence as a global sporting power.

Mutko’s great love, other than serving Putin, is soccer. He is a former president of the St Petersburg Zenit Football Club and is the president of the Russian Football Union, which has secured the rights to host the FIFA World Cup next year.According to documents obtained by the McLaren investigation, Mutko personally issued a “save’’ order for a foreign footballer playing in the Russian league. Under the Russian doping system, few foreign athletes received such protection.

The report finds that between 2012 and 2015, positive tests by 577 Russian athletes were referred to the ministry. Of those, 312 samples were made to disappear. Doping athletes from nearly every sport played in Russia — from track and field to weightlifting, fencing, sailing and table tennis — were allowed to keep cheating.

Putin was quick to cast the latest “so-called doping scandal’’ in a Cold War context. He has likened any move to ban Russia from Rio to the boycott of the Moscow Olympics by the US and other nations in response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

“Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport,’’ he says in a statement released by the Kremlin. “Yes, this intervention takes different forms today, but the essence remains the same: to make sport an instrument for geopolitical pressure and use it to form a negative image of countries and peoples. The Olympic movement, which is a tremendous force for uniting humanity, once again could find itself on the brink of division.’’ Meanwhile, In response to McLaren’s findings, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has suspended Nagornykh.

Russia’s track and field and weightlifting teams won’t compete in Rio. The cumulative weight of evidence of systematic doping in those two sports has already exerted enough pressure on their respective international federations to act. The McLaren report, after a mere three months of investigation, goes further. It implicates all of Russian sport and, crucially, the former party apparatchiks who run it, in what IOC president Thomas Bach has described as a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympics’’.

WADA has seized on McLaren’s findings to call on the IOC and its Paralympic counterpart to consider extending the Rio ban to all Russian athletes. It has also called for all Russian officials to be denied access to the Games.

Such a ban, which was due to be debated by the IOC overnight, would be a devastating blow to Russia and Putin’s prestige.

The dilemma confronting the IOC — and any sporting federations called on to rule on the participation of Russian teams in Rio — is how to punish a rogue sporting nation while respecting the individual rights of athletes who have not cheated.

The McLaren report does not present a doping case against any individual athlete. Given its imperative to report before Rio, it did not try. Instead, it exposes the bigger culprits: the ministers, their political advisers and the entire state bureaucracy that cynically planned, arranged and oversaw Russia’s drug-fuelled assault against the world.