Over
1,000 Russian athletes benefited from doping conspiracy
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[December 09, 2016]
By Mitch Phillips
LONDON (Reuters) - More than 1,000
Russian athletes competing in summer, winter and paralytic sport
were involved in or benefited from an institutional conspiracy to
conceal positive doping tests, an independent WADA report said on
Friday.
The second and final part of the report for the World Anti-Doping
Agency by Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren provided more
details of an elaborate state-sponsored doping scheme operated by
Russia.
It said there was a systematic cover-up, which was refined at the
2012 Olympics, 2013 world athletics championships and 2014 Sochi
Winter Olympics, and that more than 30 sports, including soccer,
were involved in concealing positive doping samples.
"We are now able to confirm a cover up that dates back until at
least 2011 and continued after the Sochi Olympic Games. It was a
cover up that evolved from uncontrolled chaos to an
institutionalized and disciplined medal-winning conspiracy," McLaren
told a news conference on Friday.
"It was a cover-up of an unprecedented scale and the second part of
this report shows the evidence that increases the number of athletes
involved as well as the scope of the conspiracy and cover up.
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"We have evidence revealing that more than 500 positive results were
reported as negative, including well-known and elite-level athletes,
who had their positive results automatically falsified."
McLaren said Russia won 24 gold, 26 silver and 32 bronze medals at
London 2012 and no Russian athlete tested positive.
"Yet the Russian team corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented
scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully
established," he said.
"The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and
ethical compass and Olympic values of fair play.
"For years international sports competitions have unknowingly been
hijacked by the Russians. Coaches and athletes have been playing on
an uneven field."
The report said a urine sample-swapping technique used at Sochi
became regular practice at the Moscow laboratory that dealt with
elite athletes.
It added that four Sochi gold medalists had samples with
physiologically impossible salt readings, while 12 Russian Sochi
medalists had evidence of tampering with the bottles containing
their urine samples.
The report detailed how a clean urine bank existed in the Moscow
laboratory, where salt and coffee were added to clean samples to try
to fool officials testing "B samples" in supposedly tamper-proof
bottles.
The report included evidence of DNA mismatches, where a tampered B
sample did not match the DNA of previous specimens and cases of
sample swapping between male and female athletes.
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![](../images/120916pics/sports47.jpg)
Urine samples are pictured at the Swiss Laboratory for Doping
Analysis in Epalinges near Lausanne July 15, 2008. REUTERS/Valentin
Flauraud/Files
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The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) said
in a statement that 53 percent of the athletes whose details had
been shared with them by McLean's investigation team had been
sanctioned or were currently undergoing disciplinary proceedings.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) said the full findings
of the report were unprecedented and astonishing.
"They strike right at the heart of the integrity and ethics of
sport," Paralympic sport's governing body said in a statement.
Yelena Isinbayeva, the twice Olympic pole vault champion and now a
Russian anti-doping official, however, said it was unfair to single
out Russia for criticism.
“If we want to clean up world sport, let’s start," she said. "We
don’t need to concentrate on just one country. I think banning clean
Russian sportsmen is impractical and unfair."
The original McLaren report, released in July, revealed widespread
state-sponsored doping in Russian sport.
The July report found Moscow had concealed hundreds of positive
doping tests in many sports ahead of the Sochi Games and led to a
partial ban of Russian athletes competing in the Rio Olympics in
August.
Although Russian track and field athletes and weightlifters were
banned from competing at Rio, the International Olympic Committee
rejected a blanket ban and let international sports federations
decide which athletes should be eligible to compete.
The evidence contained in the report can be found at the website:
https://www.ipevidencedisclosurepackage.net/
(Editing by Ed Osmond)
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