Olympics doping: Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s shady sport tsar
As the IOC bans Russia’s former sports minister for doping, FIFA stands in the shadows.
Russia’s dastardly plot to re-establish the country as a sporting superpower, all the while cheating in a brazen attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games, has a jaw-dropping sequel still to play out. One of the main political chiefs accused of being responsible for his country’s extraordinary doping conspiracy at the 2014 Sochi Olympics is chairman of the FIFA World Cup organising committee.
But in this parallel sporting universe, while the International Olympic Committee finally has taken concrete steps to punish Russia for its brazen sporting fraud, the world football authority, FIFA, is hiding in the shadows, not wanting to upset the Russian hosts for the world game’s big moment next year.
The man in question is Vitaly Mutko, a can-do former bureaucrat who developed a local football team and was promoted by President Vladimir Putin to run Russian sport, and Russian football, a decade ago. He is now Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, president of the Russian Football Association and chairman of the FIFA World Cup organising committee.
Yesterday Mutko was banned for life from the Olympics for overseeing systemic manipulation, and was blamed for the doping program that cheated clean athletes of Olympic medals and glory.
Yet FIFA, just an hour later, released a statement saying the IOC sanction would have “no impact on the preparations for the 2018 World Cup as we continue to work to deliver the best possible event”.
Mutko and Putin know each other from the time they were forging political careers as deputy mayors in St Petersburg. So to attack Mutko is, in a direct way, an attack on Putin.
Yet IOC president Thomas Bach is also a friend of Putin — the Russian President was the first person to call and congratulate the German on his 2013 election to take over from retiring IOC head Jacques Rogge. And yesterday, Bach, armed with a comprehensive report compiled by former Swiss president Samuel Schmid that confirmed earlier findings of the World Anti-Doping Agency probes of Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, had the incontrovertible backing to take stern steps in the sometimes slow-moving Olympic world. His main aim wasn’t the athletes but, rather, the political chiefs — Mutko and his deputy Yuri Nagornykh.
A handful of investigations into the Russian scandal during the past two years have centred on thousands of computer files, documents and testimony of one key figure, Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of Moscow’s drug-testing laboratory, and his relationships with Mutko and Nagomykh, then sports ministers.
Rodchenkov fled to the US seeking protection in November 2015, 18 months after the Sochi Olympics, and in May the following year became a whistleblower. Two of his high-powered colleagues, Russia’s anti-doping agency director Nikita Kamaev and board chairman Vyacheslav Sinev, suddenly died within nine days of each other just months earlier, in February last year. One was making moves to expose the drug cheating system in a book. Yesterday Rodchenkov said through his lawyer, Jim Walden, that he would live his life forever looking over his shoulder. “He is enormously concerned for his family, who he had to leave in Russia,” Walden says. “He hopes that the world will come together to watch out over them in case there are attempts to retaliate against them.”
What has emerged from Rodchenkov’s testimony is that Mutko’s sports ministry was orchestrating a cover-up of positive doping tests using the code names “quarantine” or “save”, depending on the athlete’s status in world sport and their political connections.
While the politicians were conducting Russian roulette with the sports stars’ careers, Rodchenkov was doping hundreds of Russian athletes with some of the most potent steroids dissolved in whisky (for the men) and vermouth (for the women), often charging them for their doping program and their “clean sample protection”.
However, it seems the pay per drug regime became relaxed in the years leading up to Sochi, especially when Russia’s poor performance at the Vancouver Olympics was a source of national shame and extra funding was released from Mutko’s sports ministry. Rodchenkov, who had acted as an independent observer at the London 2012 Olympics drug testing, also had worked out certain flaws in the system to exploit to Russia’s advantage.
The Russian lab staff would enter false negative results into the drug-testing computer system known as ADAMS. Other times they would destroy samples, including more than 1400 when WADA officials were en route for an inspection. On one occasion there is email evidence showing Mutko ordered a cover-up of a positive test sample of a foreign footballer playing in the Russian league. The Russian 2014 World Cup football team was part of the drug-testing system at the time and there are strong suspicions that their testing was being treated similarly.
Twenty-three of the squad are believed to be implicated by Rodchenkov and their details passed on to FIFA. Yesterday, FIFA said it was investigating but stressed sanctions could not be imposed based on mere suspicion or limited facts.
Previously, Mutko has deflected questions about the football doping, as Russia failed to win a game at the 2014 World Cup. “If we play like that while doped, then how would we do without? It’s absolute stupidity,” he said. Mutko was so outraged he staged a 77-minute rant at journalists before the World Cup draw last week, accusing Western media of peddling lies in a new Cold War. Sitting alongside FIFA chief Gainni Infantino, Mutko said: “I am ready to go to any court, to any disciplinary body, and say that there was never, isn’t and never will be any doping cover-up program. We don’t need any of this.” He says it is all a plot to try and sideline Russia from international competition. Any wrongdoing, he says, is a result of stupidity, not conspiracy, and claimed Russian athletics coaches who had been caught out “don’t understand how to work without doping” and that “dozens of them had been fired’’.
But the events at the Sochi Olympics went beyond rogue individual coaches or athletes, with the Russians creating a purpose-built on-site testing laboratory featuring a “mousehole” where samples secretly were moved between secure and insecure rooms to allow Russian spies to swap the drug-tainted urine of Russian athletes with clean urine that later was tested by an unsuspecting international team. The IOC has since sanctioned 25 Russian athletes from Sochi for being part of this conspiracy, plummeting Russia from the top of the medal table to fourth, and further investigations are ongoing. The Australian has learned that some further samples of female athletes show DNA of men, indicating corruption of the urine (and some sloppy attention to detail).
Having scrutinised Rodchenkov’s evidence and finding it to be solid, Bach and his executive board thus banned Russia from competing in February’s PyeongChang Winter Olympics, and blacklisted Mutko and Nagomykh from the Olympics for life. At the same time IOC officials allowed Russia’s “clean” athletes with no links to doping to compete in PyeongChang under a neutral Olympic flag. The IOC also suspended Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov as an IOC member and fined the Russians $US15 million ($19.7m), which will help contribute to an independent testing authority.
The Olympic decisions were hailed throughout the sports world. In the past nations have been barred from taking part in the Olympics — such as South Africa during apartheid— but no country previously has been handed a blanket suspension for doping. US Anti-Doping Agency chief executive Travis Tygart says: “Over the past three years, a high-stakes game of chicken has been played between those willing to sacrifice the Olympic ideals by employing a state-directed doping program to cheat to win and, on the other side, athletes unwilling to stand silent while their hopes and dreams were stolen and the Olympic Games hijacked. Today the IOC listened to those who matter most — and clean athletes won a significant victory.”
Yesterday Bach, who said as a former athlete he felt sorry for the clean athletes who had been cheated, refused to detail how he would handle Mutko’s FIFA position. FIFA is one of the IOC’s Olympic federations and Bach, as president, will be invited to attend the World Cup opening ceremony. “You know the answer to this already,” Bach began, when quizzed about the diplomatic impasse. “I don’t have an invitation there (at the World Cup) and when the invitation will come I will then decide and the IOC executive board today has made its position with regard to the responsibility of Mr Mutko very clear.”
Mutko has been updating Putin on the world cup developments, even though the President is not a keen football fan. FIFA is also battling its reputation on another front, with the US Justice Department investigating three football executives for fraud and money laundering involving broadcast deals and a broader inspection of corruption at the highest levels going back decades.
The big question is whether Putin will sideline his loyal comrade. Putin may also boycott the Winter Olympics in its entirety, although Olympic officials believe their offer to wipe Russia’s slate clean after PyeongChang is a sufficient inducement for Moscow to not rock the boat further. Bach says: “This should draw a line under this damaging episode and serve as a catalyst for a more effective anti doping system led by the World Anti-Doping Agency.”
While FIFA sits on the sidelines, the decision-making in relation to Mutko will come from the Kremlin. Putin was expected to make a response to the IOC decisions overnight. The Kremlin has long been loyal to Mutko, insisting he has done nothing wrong, so there is little to think the IOC’s move will see any change at the top or Russia’s sporting echelon.
The Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov called for calm while Moscow sought further clarification with the IOC.
“Before our Olympic meeting is held, before our athletes form some kind of a consolidated point of view, it would be premature to present any conclusions.” Mr Peskov said.
“The situation is serious, and it requires thorough analysis. One should not be carried away by emotions.’’
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