Tuesday, November 10, 2015

RUSSIA - Sochi Olympics Doping Scandal

"RUSSIA SLAMMED IN WADA DOPING REPORT" by REBECCA R. RUIZ (New York Times writer), San Diego Union-Tribune 11/10/2015

NOTE:  This is from the online version, therefore no link.

Members of Russia’s secret service intimidated workers at a drug-testing lab to cover up top athletes’ positive results.  They impersonated lab engineers during the Winter Olympics in Sochi last year.  A lab once destroyed more than 1,400 samples.  Athletes adopted false identities to avoid unexpected testing.  Some paid to make doping violations disappear.  Others bribed the anti-doping authorities to ensure favorable results, and top sports officials routinely submitted bogus urine samples for athletes who were doping.  Those allegations were among hundreds contained in a report released Monday by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).  Across 323 pages, it implicated athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors and various Russian institutions, laying out what is very likely the most extensive state sponsored doping program since the notorious East German regime of the 1970s.

In addition to providing a granular look at systematic doping, the group that drafted the report made extraordinary recommendations, including a proposal that Russia be suspended from competition by track and field’s governing body and barred from track and field events at next summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“It’s worse than we thought,” Dick Pound, founding president of the World Anti-Doping Association and an author of the report, said at a news conference in a Geneva hotel.  “This is an old attitude from the Cold War days,” he said.  Russian officials responded with defiance, disputing the investigation’s findings.  “Whatever we do, everything is bad,” Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s sports minister, told the news agency Interfax.  “If this whole system needs to shut down, we will shut it down gladly.  We will stop paying fees, stop funding the Russian anti-doping agency, the Moscow anti-doping laboratory.  We will only save money.”

Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, director of the Moscow lab whom Monday’s report accused of having solicited and accepted bribes, dismissed the suggestions.  “This is an independent commission which only issues recommendations,” he said.  “There are three fools sitting there who don’t understand the laboratory.”

Pound said he had presented the group’s findings to Mutko before they were released publicly.  “He’s frustrated to some degree,” he said.  “He certainly knew what was going on.  They all knew.”

The report also recommended WADA impose lifetime bans on five Russian coaches and five athletes, including the gold and bronze medalists from the women’s 800 meters at the 2012 London Olympics.

“The Olympic Games in London were, in a sense, sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing,” the report read.

Bans from competition are not all that could come of the inquiry.  Pound said the agency had negotiated a cooperation agreement with Interpol and handed over extensive documents and evidence.  Interpol confirmed that cooperation with its own announcement Monday, noting that related inquiries stretched from Singapore to France.

Last week, French authorities announced they had opened a criminal investigation into the former president of track and field’s world governing body, Lamine Diack of Senegal, for having allegedly accepted bribes to allow at least six Russian athletes to compete, including in the 2012 Olympics.

The former director of the medical and anti-doping division of that governing body is also under investigation, the International Association of Athletics Federations, French authorities said, along with Diack’s legal counsel.

Russian athletes, in soaring numbers, have been caught doping in recent years.  Russia had far more drug violations than any other country in 2013: 225, or 12 percent of all violations globally, according to data from WADA.  About a fifth of Russia’s infractions involved track and field athletes, the focus of Monday’s report.

“This level of corruption attacks sport at its core,” Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer and an author of the report, said in an interview.  In contrast to corporate governance scandals like those roiling world soccer, he said, drug use by athletes has distorted the essence of professional games.  “Bribes and payoffs don’t change actual sporting events,” McLaren said.  “But doping takes away fair competition.”  The report released Monday was the result of a 10 month investigation by an independent commission of WADA.  Its inquiry stemmed from a December documentary by the German public broadcaster ARD, which drew on accounts from Russian athletes, coaches and anti-doping authorities, who said the Russian government had helped procure drugs for athletes and cover up positive test results.

Further allegations emerged in August, when ARD and The Sunday Times of London released another report more broadly focused on the leaked results of thousands of international athletes’ blood tests dating to 2001, showing decorated athletes in good standing with suspicious drug tests.  Those allegations — which drew significant suspicion to Kenya — are also being investigated by the independent commission, but the results were not included in Monday’s report, as the inquiry is continuing, the agency said.

The three-person commission, chaired by Pound, also included McLaren, who teaches law at Western University in Ontario, and Gunter Younger, head of cybercrime for the police in the German state of Bavaria.

WADA’s foundation and executive board will decide whether to act on the commission’s recommendations; they are scheduled to meet next week in Colorado Springs, Colo., an event that motivated the timing of the release of the commission’s report, Pound said.

In a statement Monday, the International Olympic Committee called the report “deeply shocking,” and said it trusted the judgment of the IAAF, which would decide whether to bar Russia from competition.

Pound did not offer any time frame for the recommended suspension.  If Russia did not fight the prescriptions — to enact rigorous and specific drug-testing controls — he said he thought it could be possible for the country’s track and field athletes to compete in the summer Olympics.

The commission also recommended that the Russian anti-doping authority be declared non-code-compliant, indefinitely; that the director of the Moscow laboratory be removed from his job; and that the lab, which was provisionally banned in 2013, lose its accreditation.

No comments: