World Anti-Doping Agency accuses Russia of widespread doping; wants ban on Russian athletes

GENEVA: In a devastatingly critical report, a World Anti-Doping Agency panel accused the Russian government on Monday of complicity in widespread doping and cover-ups by its track and field athletes and said they should all be banned from competition — possibly even next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — until the country cleans up its act. The report from a WADA commission that has been probing media allegations of widespread doping and deception in Russia — host of soccer’s next World Cup — said even the country’s intelligence service, the FSB, was involved, spying on Moscow’s anti-doping lab, including during last year’s Winter Games in Sochi. The commission chaired by Dick Pound recommended that WADA immediately declare the Russian federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition. [caption id=“attachment_2091617” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational Image. Getty[/caption] “It’s pretty disturbing,” Pound said. “It’s worse than we thought.” “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system,” he added at a news conference in Geneva. Pound said the doping could be called state-sponsored. “They would certainly have known,” he said of Russian officials. The commission said the International Olympic Committee should not accept any entries from the Russian athletics federation until the body has been declared complaint with the code and the suspension has been lifted. Such a decision could keep Russian athletes out of next year’s Olympics in Brazil. If Russia doesn’t clean up, “the outcome may be that there are no Russian track and field athletes in Rio,” Pound said. But he also said there may still be time for Russia to avoid that, if it starts reforming immediately. “I think they can do it, I hope they can,” Pound 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 report said 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. IAAF president Sebastien Coe, giving his first reaction in London, said the report’s conclusions were “alarming” but he had begun the process “of considering sanctions against ARAF” (Russian Athletics federation). [caption id=“attachment_2377792” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  File image. Reuters[/caption] “We need time to properly digest and understand the detailed findings included in the report,” Coe said in a statement. “However, I have urged the Council to start the process of considering sanctions against ARAF.” The crisis in athletics - already viewed as more damaging than the corruption scandal engulfing world football governing body FIFA - first erupted with allegations of doping aired in a German TV documentary in December 2014. Pound said Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko must also have known. “It was not possible for him to be unaware of it,” Pound said. The commission report said Mutko issued direct orders to “manipulate particular samples.” 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 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 widespread doping, possibly by pre-screening athletes’ doping 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.” With AFP & AP inputs