Russia faces Olympic ban after hugely critical doping report

GENEVA (AP) — Russian track and field athletes could be banned from next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro after a devastatingly critical report accused the country’s government of complicity in widespread doping and cover-ups.

The World Anti-Doping Agency commission set up to investigate doping in Russia said even the country’s intelligence service, the FSB, was involved, spying on Moscow’s anti-doping lab, including during last year’s Olympics in Sochi.

The commission chaired by Dick Pound recommended that WADA immediately declare the Russian athletics federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition.

“It’s worse than we thought,” Pound said. “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”

The IAAF responded immediately, saying it will consider sanctions against Russia, including a possible suspension of the athletics federation that would ban Russian track and field athletes from international competition, including the Olympics.

“If they are suspended — and it sounds like the IAAF is moving in that direction already — and they are still suspended, at the time of Rio there will be no Russian track and field athletes there,” Pound said in an interview with The Associated Press after the release of his commission’s findings.

He said Russia’s doping could be called state-sponsored.

“They would certainly have known,” he said of Russian officials.

To the AP, he added: “We have finally identified one of the major powers as being involved in this. It’s not just small countries or little pockets. This is a major sporting country. It’s got to be a huge embarrassment.”

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, whose ministry was accused by the WADA probe of giving orders to cover up doping violations, insisted Russia’s problems are no worse than in other countries and said Russia is being persecuted, telling the Interfax news agency: “Whatever we do, everything is bad.”

He threatened to cut all government funding for anti-doping work, saying “if we have to close this whole system, we would be happy to” because “we will only save money.”

The acting president of the Russian athletics federation, Vadim Zelichenok, said he does not believe doping there is systematic or that the government or security services helped to cover up cases.

The WADA commission said the International Olympic Committee should not accept any entries from the Russian athletics federation until the body has been declared complaint with WADA’s doping code and a suspension has been lifted.

Pound said there may still be time for Russia to avoid the “nuclear weapon” of a ban from the Olympics, if it starts reforming immediately. That work that will take at least “several months” and “there are a lot of people who are going to have to walk the plank before this happens,” he said.

“I think they can do it. I hope they can,” he added.

More damaging revelations are to come. The WADA commission is also looking at the role senior officials at the IAAF allegedly played in bribery and extortion involving Russian athletes. French authorities last week detained and later charged former IAAF President Lamine Diack with corruption and money laundering. The WADA commission’s findings on that angle could come before the end of the year.

As it was, the WADA report on Monday said “widespread inaction” by the IAAF and Russian authorities allowed athletes suspected of doping to continue competing.

“(The) Olympic Games in London were, in a sense, sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing, and could have been prevented from competing,” it said.

The commission accused the Russian state of complicity. It said its months-long probe found no written evidence of government involvement, but it added: “It would be naive in the extreme to conclude that activities on the scale discovered could have occurred without the explicit or tacit approval of Russian governmental authorities.”

The findings prompted a damning response from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that brought down Lance Armstrong, another case that shattered public faith in sports.

“If Russia has created an organized scheme of state-supported doping, then they have no business being allowed to compete on the world stage,” USADA CEO Travis Tygart said.

The WADA probe found that agents from the FSB even infiltrated Russia’s anti-doping work at the Sochi Olympics. One witness told the inquiry that “in Sochi, we had some guys pretending to be engineers in the lab but actually they were from the federal security service.”

Staff at Russia’s anti-doping lab in Moscow believed their offices were bugged by the FSB and an FSB agent, thought to be Evgeniy Blotkin or Blokhin, regularly visited.

This was part of a wider pattern of “direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state with the Moscow laboratory operations,” the report said.

Pound said Mutko, the sports minister, must also have known.

“It was not possible for him to be unaware of it,” Pound said.

Mutko, who is also a FIFA executive committee member and leads the 2018 World Cup organizing committee, denied wrongdoing to the WADA inquiry panel, including knowledge of athletes being blackmailed and FSB intelligence agents interfering in lab work.

The WADA report also said Moscow testing laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov ordered 1,417 doping control samples to be destroyed to deny evidence for the inquiry.

It said Rodchenkov “personally instructed and authorized” the destruction of evidence three days before a WADA audit team arrived in Moscow last December.

The WADA panel said it wanted to send the Russian athletes’ samples to labs in other countries to detect banned drugs and doping methods.

The panel also raised suspicions that Russia may have has been using an obscure laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow to help cover up doping, possibly by pre-screening athletes’ samples and ditching those that test positive.

It said whistleblowers and confidential witnesses “corroborated that this second laboratory is involved in the destruction and the cover-up of what would otherwise be positive doping tests.”

The panel also said it does not believe that the doping problem is limited to athletics or to Russian sports. Pound singled out Kenya, saying it seems the East African powerhouse of long-distance running “has a real problem.”

“In its considered view,” the commission said, “Russia is not the only country, nor athletics the only sport, facing the problem of orchestrated doping.”