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Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic
Gold
by Rebecca R. Ruiz And
Michael Schwirtz May 12, 2016
The director of Russia’s antidoping
laboratory at the time of the Sochi Games said urine samples were
surreptitiously replaced by somehow breaking into supposedly tamper-proof
bottles.
LOS ANGELES — Dozens of
Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15
medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned
for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the
country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.
The director, Grigory
Rodchenkov, who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of
Olympians, said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he
mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes, helping to
facilitate one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports
history.
It involved some of Russia’s
biggest stars of the Games, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team
and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds.
In a dark-of-night operation,
Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service
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.
None of the athletes were
caught doping. More important, Russia won the most medals of the Games, easily
surpassing its main rival, the United States, and undermining the integrity of
one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.
“People are celebrating
Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,”
Dr. Rodchenkov said. “Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?”
After The New York Times
asked Russian officials to respond to the claims, Russia’s sports minister,
Vitaly Mutko, released a statement to the news media calling the revelations “a
continuation of the information attack on Russian sport.”
Dr. Rodchenkov laid out the
details of the operation over three days of interviews that were arranged by an
American filmmaker, Bryan Fogel, who is working on a documentary that involves
Dr. Rodchenkov.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s account
could not be independently verified, but it was consistent with the broad
findings of a report published last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency. He
provided The Times with emails detailing doping efforts and a spreadsheet that
he said was sent to him by the sports ministry before the Sochi Games. It named
the athletes involved in the doping program.
Dr. Rodchenkov described his
own work at Sochi as a “strong accomplishment,” the apex of a decade-long
effort to perfect Russia’s doping strategy at international competitions.
“We were fully equipped,
knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly prepared for Sochi like never before,”
he said. “It was working like a Swiss watch.”
After Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov
was awarded the prestigious Order of Friendship by President Vladimir V. Putin.
Six months ago, however, he
had a dramatic change in fortune.
In November, the World
Anti-Doping Agency identified Dr. Rodchenkov as the linchpin in what it
described as an extensive state-sponsored doping program in Russia, accusing
him of extorting money from athletes — the only accusation he denies — as well
as covering up positive drug tests and destroying hundreds of urine samples.
After the report came out,
Dr. Rodchenkov said, Russian officials forced him to resign. Fearing for his
safety, he moved to Los Angeles, with the help of Mr. Fogel.
Back in Russia, two of Dr.
Rodchenkov’s close colleagues died unexpectedly in February, within weeks of
each other; both were former antidoping officials, one who resigned soon after
Dr. Rodchenkov fled the country.
The November report was
primarily focused on track and field, but Dr. Rodchenkov described the whole
spectrum of Russian sport as tainted by banned substances. Admitting to more
than what WADA investigators accused him of, he said it was not hundreds of
urine samples that he destroyed but rather several thousand in last-ditch
efforts to mask the extent of the country’s doping.
Dr. Rodchenkov said he
received the spreadsheet naming athletes on the doping program on Jan. 21,
2014, two weeks before the Games and shortly after he arrived in Sochi to begin
work at the Olympic laboratory. It was to be used for reference during
competition, Dr. Rodchenkov said, and outlined the competition schedule for each
athlete. If any of them won a medal, their urine samples had to be substituted.
Until now, a precise
accounting of how Russian officials could have executed such a complex doping
operation was not publicly known.
Pressure to Win
Dr. Rodchenkov’s revelations,
his first public comments since fleeing, come at a crucial moment for Russia.
In November, in the wake of the WADA report, the country was provisionally
suspended from international track and field competition; in the coming weeks,
leaders of the sport’s global governing body will decide whether to lift a ban
ahead of this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Russia is also preparing to
host the next World Cup, in 2018.
Responding to the cascade of
accusations, Mr. Putin called for an inquiry, but Russian officials have been
largely dismissive of claims about widespread doping by the country’s athletes.
The antidoping laboratory for the 2014
Olympics was situated at the Olympic Park in Sochi, Russia.
The Times submitted questions
about the revelations to the sports ministry and six of its sports federations
whose athletes were identified as part of the doping program. Instead of
responding directly, Mr. Mutko, the minister, organized a news conference with
journalists from the state-run news agency TASS, calling The Times’s inquiry
baseless and suggesting it was part of an attempt to discredit Russian sports
ahead of the Rio Games.
“The system of organization
of the Olympic Games was completely transparent,” Mr. Mutko told TASS.
“Everything was under the control of international experts — from the
collection of samples to their analysis.”
Dr. Rodchenkov said the
sports ministry actively guided the doping effort. In the six months before the
Games, he said, he met with Mr. Mutko’s deputy, Yuri Nagornykh, in a
second-floor office at the ministry’s palatial Moscow headquarters at least
once a week.
In an email, Mr. Nagornykh
denied the existence of a doping program. “I have nothing to hide,” he wrote.
Russian officials were under
enormous pressure ahead of the Games. Sochi was to be a showcase of Russia’s
resurgence as a global power, and the entire country was enlisted in the
project. Billions of dollars were spent transforming the shabby subtropical
resort town into a winter sports paradise. Mr. Putin himself had negotiated
Russia’s Olympic bid and was personally involved in much of the planning.
Hanging over everything was
Russia’s disastrous sixth-place finish in the medal count at the previous
Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, British Columbia. It would not matter if the
world was wowed by the opening ceremony, or if the ski lifts ran smoothly.
Dr. Rodchenkov said it was up
to him to ensure that Russian athletes won the most medals, preferably gold
ones.
He had been the director of
Russia’s antidoping laboratory in Moscow since 2005, and was widely considered
among the world’s top experts in performance-enhancing drugs. He often
experimented with such drugs on himself, he said.
He published papers in
peer-reviewed journals, traveled often to scientific conferences abroad and was
a frequent guest at the annual antidoping symposium organized by the United
States Anti-Doping Agency, most recently in October in Lansdowne, Va., just a
month before he was forced to step down.
By his own admission, Dr.
Rodchenkov, who has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, used his expertise to help
athletes properly use banned substances and go undetected, which he says was
done at the behest of the Russian government. After years of trial and error, he
said, he developed a cocktail of three anabolic steroids — metenolone,
trenbolone and oxandrolone — that he claims many top-level Russian athletes
used leading up to the London Olympics in 2012 and throughout the Sochi Games.
He said he did not administer
the drugs himself but rather provided them to the sports ministry.
The drugs, Dr. Rodchenkov
said, helped athletes recover quickly after grueling training regimens,
allowing them to compete in top form over successive days.
To speed up absorption of the
steroids and shorten the detection window, he dissolved the drugs in alcohol —
Chivas whiskey for men, Martini vermouth for women.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s formula was
precise: one milligram of the steroid mixture for every milliliter of alcohol.
The athletes were instructed to swish the liquid around in their mouths, under
the tongue, to absorb the drugs.
In the interviews, Dr.
Rodchenkov boasted about his ability to shield doped athletes from detection.
Even so, Russia had the highest number of athletes caught doping in 2014,
according to WADA statistics.
Dr. Rodchenkov said that some
of his athletes would at times take drugs he had not approved, making them
vulnerable to discovery. “All athletes are like small children,” he said. “They’ll
put anything you give them into their mouths.”
A case in point, he said, was
Elena Lashmanova, a gold medalist in racewalking at the 2012 London Games. She
had tested positive for banned substances while international observers were
scrutinizing his lab, and to cover up her results would have endangered the
entire operation, he said.
In an email to Mr. Nagornykh,
the deputy sports minister, dated April 18, 2014, he wrote that there was
nothing he could do to protect Ms. Lashmanova without risking the lab’s
accreditation.
“Honestly, this lawlessness
has reached its logical conclusion,” he wrote. “There can be no second opinion
about this.”
Three months later, Ms.
Lashmanova was suspended from international competition for two years.
Planning for Sochi
For Dr. Rodchenkov,
preparations for Sochi began in earnest in the fall of 2013. It was around that
time, he said, that a man he came to believe was working for the Russian
internal intelligence service, the F.S.B., began showing up at the lab in Moscow,
inquiring about the bottles used for storing the urine samples tested for
banned substances.
The man took a particular
interest in the toothed metal rings that lock the bottles when the cap is
twisted shut. He collected hundreds of them, Dr. Rodchenkov said.
An employee at the lab, who
spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the authorities,
said that at some point it was communicated to employees that the man was there
to “protect the lab.” He would pepper people with questions about the bottles,
the employee said, but always in a friendly way. While his motivations were not
explicit, they eventually became obvious to those working in the lab.
“It was clear that he was
going to try to get into the bottles,” the employee said.
At all major international
athletic competitions, athletes are required to submit a urine sample for
testing. The sample is divided into two bottles. One, the A bottle, is tested
immediately; the other, the B bottle, is sealed and stored for up to 10 years,
in case the athlete’s past performance is ever called into question. A Swiss
company, Berlinger, produces the self-locking glass bottles used for
international competitions, including the Olympics.
Because of the strict testing
protocols at competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said, athletes typically have to halt
the use of banned substances before an event to avoid testing positive. But in
hosting the Sochi Games, national sports officials saw an opportunity: They
could control the antidoping lab results, he said, and allow athletes to use
performance-enhancing drugs throughout competition.
Getting into the bottles was
the key.
How exactly this was
accomplished is still a mystery. Dr. Rodchenkov claims that at some point
several weeks before the start of the Games, the man he believed to be an
F.S.B. agent presented him with a previously sealed bottle that had been
opened, its uniquely numbered cap intact.
“When I first time saw that
bottle is open, I did not believe my eyes,” he said, adding: “I truly believed
this was tamper proof.”
Swapping Out Dirty Urine
In the months before Sochi,
according to the November WADA report, international doping officials had
threatened to revoke the accreditation of Dr. Rodchenkov’s lab because of
suspicious discrepancies in sample results and complaints of “external
interferences” in the lab’s operations. In November 2013, a disciplinary
committee convened in Johannesburg to review the case.
“Despite the substandard performance
of the laboratory, there was a distinct desire not to revoke the accreditation
of the laboratory prior to the Sochi Olympics,” last year’s WADA report said.
The testing laboratory for
the Sochi Games had a staff of nearly 100 people, including employees of Dr.
Rodchenkov’s lab in Moscow as well as dozens of international antidoping
experts, flown in from cities like Beijing; Doha, Qatar; and Lausanne,
Switzerland.
Security was tight. There
were numerous surveillance cameras, and anyone wishing to enter the lab
required security clearance.
An independent observer
watched over the lab at random times of day, WADA said, but rarely worked
overnight during the roughly two weeks of competition.
The hole in the wall (covered by a
removable cap) through which tainted urine samples were passed and replaced by
clean samples during the Sochi Games, according to Dr. Rodchenkov.
Dr. Rodchenkov said that each
night, a sports ministry official would send him a list of athletes whose
samples needed to be swapped. To match the individual athletes to their
anonymous samples — which are coded with a seven-digit number — Dr. Rodchenkov
said that athletes snapped pictures of their sample forms, including the code,
and texted them to the ministry, offering forbidden insight into whose urine
was whose.
After receiving a signal that
“the urines were ready,” he changed from his lab coat into a Russian national
team sweatshirt and left his fourth-floor office, typically after midnight. He
checked that the coast was clear and made his way to Room 124, officially a
storage space that he and his team had converted into a shadow laboratory.
There, he said, with the
room’s single window blacked out with tape, the switch would be made.
A colleague stationed next
door in the sample collection room would retrieve the correct bottles and pass
them into the storage room through a circular hole cut through the wall near
the floor, Dr. Rodchenkov said. During the day, he said, the hole was concealed
by a small imitation-wood cabinet.
The sealed B bottles were
handed over to the man Dr. Rodchenkov believed was a Russian intelligence
officer, who would take them to an adjacent building. Within hours, Dr.
Rodchenkov said, the bottles were returned to the storage room, their caps
unlocked.
That man also supplied clean
urine, collected from each of the athletes months prior to the Olympics, before
they started doping, Dr. Rodchenkov said. It was delivered in soda bottles,
baby formula bottles and other miscellaneous containers, he said.
Making sure to keep the
overhead light off, Dr. Rodchenkov and a colleague dumped the tainted urine
into a nearby toilet, washed out the bottles, dried them with filter paper and
filled them with the clean urine.
He would then add table salt
or water to balance out any inconsistencies in the recorded specifications of
the two samples. Depending on what an athlete had consumed, two urine samples
taken at different times could vary.
Typically, the small team
worked till dawn, breaking only occasionally for instant coffee and cigarettes.
Victory
In the Sochi Games, Russian
athletes won 33 medals — including 13 golds, 10 more than at the previous
Winter Olympics.
A third of all medals were
awarded to athletes whose names appeared on the spreadsheet outlining the
government’s doping plan that Dr. Rodchenkov said was provided by the sports
ministry before the Games.
They included Alexander
Zubkov, a veteran bobsledder who won two golds; Alexander Legkov, a
cross-country skier who won gold and silver; and Alexander Tretyakov, who won
gold in the skeleton competition.
Still, not all athletes on
the list won a medal. The entire women’s hockey team was doping throughout the
Games, Dr. Rodchenkov said. It finished in sixth place.
Efforts to reach these
athletes and others through their sports federations in Russia were
unsuccessful. Several of the federations replied and denied any wrongdoing by
their athletes. A spokesperson for the Russian Bobsled Federation said that all
of its athletes “underwent doping control procedures in accordance to the
rules.”
“All of them were clean, and
not one positive result was found.”
The International Olympic
Committee called Dr. Rodchenkov’s account “very detailed and very worrying” on
Thursday. “We ask the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate immediately,” a
spokesman said.
WADA officials were in board
meetings on Thursday and unavailable for interviews. The agency had previously
said it was looking into allegations of Russian doping and the Sochi lab and
did not add anything further by email.
Southern California
After the Olympics, the
praise directed at Dr. Rodchenkov was effusive. He received commendations from
not only Mr. Putin, but also the International Olympic Committee and the World
Anti-Doping Agency.
A subsequent report published
by WADA called Sochi “a milestone in the evolution of the Olympic Games
antidoping program.”
The next year, however, WADA
published a very different report which said investigators had found systematic
doping among Russian track and field athletes. That inquiry, prompted by
accusations from two whistle-blowers in Russian athletics — first published by
the German public broadcaster ARD — put Dr. Rodchenkov squarely at the center
of a national conspiracy.
Within days, he was forced to
resign, he said, and fearing for his safety, fled to Los Angeles. His travel
was arranged by Mr. Fogel, whom he had first met just after Sochi, in 2014. Mr.
Fogel was working on a documentary seeking to expose shortcomings in
drug-testing for international sport — charting his own competition results
with and without banned drugs — and Dr. Rodchenkov served as his adviser.
In his six months in Los
Angeles, Dr. Rodchenkov has taken on a more active role in that documentary,
“Icarus,” to be released in September. He has otherwise spent his time
gardening, making borscht and writing in his diary.
Reflecting on his career, he
said he was unapologetic about his role in Russia’s doping program, considering
it a condition of his employment. To receive funding and support for his lab,
he said, he had to do the Kremlin’s bidding.
He had occasionally, however,
run afoul of the Russian authorities in his work. In 2011, he was investigated
for trafficking in performance-enhancing drugs, and he said he fully expected
to go to prison. His sister was convicted and imprisoned on similar charges.
The investigation into Dr.
Rodchenkov, however, disappeared.
He said he could not be sure
why, but he suspected that he had been spared punishment so that he could play
a crucial role at the Sochi Games.
“It’s my redemption: success
in Sochi,” he said. “Instead of being in prison, win at any cost.”
^^^^^
5/13/16 update from the NY Times:
Mystery in Sochi Doping Case Lies With
Tamper-Proof Bottle
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