According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, Russian athletes were an affair of State. The Ministry of Sports was engaged in doping Russian atheltes with the help even of the federal security services. But there is nothing strange in a country where the same institutions are juiced.
The Kremlin plays dirty. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an independent international organization for the fight against doping in international sport competitions, went in hard. It required to decline entries, for Rio 2016, of all athletes submitted by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee, as well as Russian government officials to be denied access to international competitions.
The McLaren report, the final synthesis of the long investigations into the doping scandal in Russia published Monday, found “beyond reasonable doubt” that “the anti-doping laboratories in Moscow and Sochi operated within a State-dictated failsafe system in which the Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athletes’ analytical results and sample swapping, with the active participation and assistance of the FSB”, Putin’s secret services.
Intelligence agents role was “removing bottles caps and providing clean urine for sample swapping” with positive ones. The FSB involvement was such that Grigory Rodchenkov – the former director of the Moscow laboratory, now a refugee in the United States, who has uncovered the system along with middle-distance runner Yulia Stepanova – had been enrolled in the intelligence services as an agent, with the code name “Kuts”.
The one orchestrated by the Russian Ministry of Sports, the McLaren report reads, was “a systematic cheating of Russian athletes” in international competitions, such that “the presumption of innocence from Russian athletes in these sports is therefore seriously called into question.” So far, only two athletes were cleared to the Rio games, Stepanova herself and long jumper Darya Klishina on the basis that by training and living in the US they’ve been under the control of the most reliable American anti-doping laboratories.
Even in sports, Putin’s Russia shows more and more legacies of the Soviet past. Research on medical aid to athletes were integral part of the USSR sports culture, under a centralized and secretive system. The Soviet Committee for Sport, the Sportkomitet, conducted studies on doping substances for Soviet athletes preparing for the Olympics. Not much has changed.
Much more than a sports scandal
The Executive Committee of WADA in a statement has even noted that, “despite all public undertakings that were claimed by the Russian Government, they were so confident in the inability of outsiders to detect what was going on, that they operated in the same manner during the time that WADA was carrying out its investigation”.
Clearly, what brought to light by the McLaren report goes far beyond sport. Russian institutions at the highest level – the Ministry of Sport, the FSB secret service, the National Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), the Olympic Committee – were working with no holds barred or resource savings with only one goal: to lie and cheat the international community.
Nothing new under the sun. It’s the same identical pattern we see, for example, used to cover the bombing in Syria. The Ministry of Defence provides movies onboard the planes, satellite photos, evidence to prove that only hit targets at Isis. Proofs that are systematically false, deceptive, distorted. In a word, lies.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen for misleading on the dawning of flight MH17: photoshopped satellite imagery, far-fetched TV reenactments, bogus scientific experiments. In a word, lies.
It’s the same pattern we saw for hiding military interventions in Donbass, a deluge of statements by Putin and the Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu to say that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine, words contradicted by countless photos and testimonies from the field. In a word, lies.
It’s still the same pattern seen in Crimea, used to legitimize a forced annexation in breach of the international law through doped referendum that, unlike the RUSADA swapped samples, didn’t even have the appearance of being genuine.
The same scheme used to imprison and prosecute the Estonian secret services officer, Eston Khover, abducted by the FSB at the border with Estonia, exposed on television and stuck with baseless accusations. In one word, he lies.
According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, Russian athletes were an affair of State. The Ministry of Sports was engaged in doping Russian atheltes with the help even of the federal security services. But there is nothing strange in a country where the same institutions are juiced.
