What Substances Were Used to Manipulate Russian Samples?
Russian cross-state skier Alexander Legkov, who won a gold and a silver at the 2014 Wintertime Olympics in Sochi, speaks at a news briefing in May to deny allegations that dozens of Russian athletes were role of a state-run doping program. A detailed study by the World Anti-Doping Bureau on Monday said the doping programme was in place for years before and during the Olympics. Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
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Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images
Russian cantankerous-land skier Alexander Legkov, who won a gold and a silver at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, speaks at a news briefing in May to deny allegations that dozens of Russian athletes were part of a state-run doping program. A detailed report by the World Anti-Doping Agency on Monday said the doping program was in identify for years before and during the Olympics.
Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images
After a subpar showing at the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Russians devised an elaborate, hush-hush programme to ensure a stellar performance at the 2014 games they were hosting in Sochi.
Here'due south how it worked: In the expressionless of night, Russian officials exchanged the tainted urine from their athletes who had been doping with clean samples by passing them through a "mouse hole" drilled into the wall of the anti-doping lab. When the urine was tested the next day, there were no signs of doping, according to a detailed new report.
The Russian results in Sochi were spectacular. The Russians won 33 medals, more than than whatever other country, compared with a disappointing 15 medals in Vancouver four years earlier, a count that put them in sixth place, just behind Austria.
The report released Monday was produced by Canadian professor Richard McLaren, on behalf of the Earth Anti-Doping Agency.
The Russian deportment have been so egregious, and the doping so pervasive, that the anti-doping agency recommended the unprecedented step of banning the entire Russian team from the Summertime Olympics next month in Brazil.
The International Olympic Commission, which has already barred the Russian track and field team, held an emergency meeting Tuesday to consider the recommendation. The IOC said it would "explore legal options" but put off a final decision, though the games starting time in less than three weeks.
The Russians accept repeatedly denied the existence of a country-run doping program.
"Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport," President Vladimir Putin said in a lengthy statement on Mon.
The Russian operation in Sochi was get-go reported at length by The New York Times in May, and McLaren's findings provided additional details every bit it looked at Russian efforts that plainly began ramping upwards after the poor showing in 2010.
The primal source for both McLaren and The Times is Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia's anti-doping agency, who fled the country subsequently he was implicated final November. Rodchenkov, who is now in Los Angeles, has estimated that 100 urine samples were swapped out during the Olympics, including those of at least xv Russian medal winners.
Tight security at the lab
The new report said the widespread Russian doping efforts included a special operation set up specifically for the Sochi Games.
Security was extremely tight at the anti-doping lab for the Olympics, but Russian officials were among those with access. In an side by side room, Rodchenkov said, he had clean samples from the Russian athletes. The athletes had produced them months before, when they temporarily stopped taking a iii-drug cocktail the doctor said he adult. Those clean samples were frozen.
A small hole in the wall of the lab, near ground level, was covered during the day. Only at night, it was opened so the urine samples could be exchanged with Evgeny Kurdyatsev, a Russian official who worked inside the lab, according to the latest report and the before ane in the Times.
"At a convenient moment, usually effectually midnight when no 1 else was in the room, Kurdyatsev would laissez passer the protected athletes' A and B samples through the mouse pigsty in the [lab] to the operations room where Dr. Rodchenkov and others were waiting," the report said.
"Once the samples were passed through, they were given to [Russian intelligence agent Evgeny] Blokhin, who had a security clearance to enter the laboratory under the guise of being a sewer engineer employed by applied science company Bilfinger."
Notwithstanding, the exchange of urine was complicated because the dirty samples, produced by the athletes shortly later on competition, were in marked bottles with seals that were supposed to exist tamperproof.
The Russians managed to open the bottles without detection, disposing of the dirty samples. They then replaced them with the old, defrosted, clean samples and resealed the bottles.
Investigators checked a representative set of 11 bottles and institute that all xi "had scratches and marks on the inside of the bottle caps representative of the apply of a tool used to open the cap," the report said.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/07/19/486595080/report-russia-used-mouse-hole-to-swap-urine-samples-of-olympic-athletes