Russia accused of widespread doping, cover-ups in damning report

In a devastatingly critical report, a World Anti-Doping Agency panel accused the Russian government Monday of complicity in widespread doping and cover-ups by its track and field athletes and said they should all be banned from competition 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 Olympics 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 International Association of Athletics Federations should suspend the federation from competition.

It also said the International Olympic Committee should not accept any entries from the Russian federation until the body has been declared compliant with the code and the suspension has been lifted. Such a decision could keep Russian athletes out of next year's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Sebastian Coe, the head of the International Association of Athletics Federations, said he had given the Russian athletics federation until the end of the week to respond to a report into alleged widespread doping in the country that could lead to their suspension from the Olympic Games.

"I will seek an explanation for the allegations and the (IAAF) Council will then make a judgment," Coe told journalists.

The IAAF Council has the power to act on the recommendations and ban Russia from sanctioned events, including next year's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and the 2017 world championships in London.

The WADA commission also accused the Russian state of complicity. It said its monthslong 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.

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.”

Wire services