Over two years ago at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russian athletes walked away with 33 medals, including 13 golds and 11 silvers, more than any other country. None of these medal winners were caught doping at the time.
However, an investigation by the New York Times reveals that this success was due in part to “one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports history.”
Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, is the whistleblower.
For years, he used his experience as a PhD in analytical chemistry to help Russian athletes dope with his go-to drug cocktail, a combination of three anabolic steroids that would help athletes recover faster after rigorous training sessions. Like a mad scientist, Dr. Rodchenkov would mix the drugs with alcohol — Chivas whiskey for men, Martini vermouth for women — in order to help the drugs absorb more quickly in the athletes’ systems.
Until Sochi, most of the doping was out-of-competition. But Dr. Rodchenkov told the Times that Russian officials took the program to the next level in Sochi because of their home-country advantage. They recognized that they would have more access to (and knowledge of) the laboratories in Sochi where urine samples would be tested for doping, and therefore had an ability to artificially increase their medal count after a disappointing showing at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
“We were fully equipped, knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly prepared for Sochi like never before,” Dr. Rodchenkov said. “It was working like a Swiss watch.”
Report Details Extensive Cover-Up Of Russian Doping Scandal By Top Track OfficialsSports by CREDIT: Andy Wong, AP Track and field’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics…thinkprogress.orgMonths after Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov was awarded the Order of Friendship by President Vladimir V. Putin for his work at the Games. But he fled Russia for Los Angeles out of concern for his safety after being named in a November report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Two of his colleagues, who were also named in the report, were later found dead.
Dr. Rodchenkov talked to the Times from Los Angeles, where he is now working closely with American filmmaker Bryan Fogel on a documentary. He detailed the scope and specifics of Russia’s program.
In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence services surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.
By the end of the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.
According to Dr. Rodchenkov, preparations for Sochi began about six months in advance, when a man believed to be working with the Russian internal intelligence service (FSB) started showing up to the Moscow lab and closely investigating how the bottles used to seal the samples worked. Around the same time, Dr. Rodchenkov began meeting weekly with the staff of Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s sports minister. Two weeks before the Games began, he received a spreadsheet naming the athletes in the doping program and outlining their competition schedules.
But the really complex maneuvering began once the official Olympic torch was lit. Dr. Rodchenkov told the Times that each night, he’d receive a list from a sports ministry official detailing the samples that would need to be swapped. Because samples are anonymous, the athletes had to assist in this part of the plan; they snapped photos of their sample forms so that Dr. Rodchenkov would have the seven-digit number associated with their urine sample.
When he got the signal that the samples were ready, Dr. Rodchenkov would take off his lab coat, change into a Russian national team sweatshirt, and make his way downstairs to a storage space that had been converted into a makeshift lab, its lone window covered with tape. Then, one of his colleagues would pass the sealed samples to him through a hole in the wall that was covered by a cabinet during the day-time hours.
Here's the hole Russian lab used to grab dirty urine samples and replace with clean ones https://t.co/hgjJPlAL6O pic.twitter.com/oIkZVA9d0S
— NYT Sports (@NYTSports) May 12, 2016
Dr. Rodchenkov would pass the samples along to “the man [he] believed was a Russian intelligence officer,” who would take the samples away and return them hours later, with caps unlocked. The officer also supplied clean urine that was supplied by the athletes months prior to the Olympics.
Overall, its reported that a third of all medals won by Russians were won by athletes on Dr. Rodchenkov’s spreadsheet, including two-time gold medalist in bobsledding, Alexander Zubkov, and cross-country skier Alexander Legkov, a gold and silver medalist in cross-country skiing.
As Dan Wetzel wrote for Yahoo, this report is proof that the Sochi Olympics were “a fake.”
“The IOC, thinking it had found its latest desperate despot with billions to burn on it while cooing in its ear, was actually being played for fools, as Russia used the home-country advantage to attempt to rig the entire event,” Wetzel said.
The fall-out from this report could be vast. After the WADA report last November, the Russian track & field team was suspended from competition, and it is awaiting word on whether the sport’s governing body will be allowed to compete this summer in Rio. Russia is also scheduled to host the 2018 World Cup.
Currently, Russia is considering suing the New York Times over the report. Putin has called the report “a turncoat’s libel.”