GENEVA — Top Russian athletes, including Olympians and winners of prestigious events like the Chicago marathon, have for years participated in a systematic doping program that involved some of Russia’s sports officials, the World Anti-Doping Agency said on Monday.
The agency released a lengthy report here that described a pervasive doping culture among Russia’s sports programs, evoking notorious drug regimes like the state-run doping system of East Germany. The report recommended that Russia be suspended from competition by track and field’s governing body, and one of its authors said it would encourage the International Olympic Committee to bar Russia’s athletic federation from next summer’s Rio Olympics.
“It’s worse than we thought,” said Richard W. Pound, a co-author of the report. “It’s residue of the old Soviet Union system.”
The report implicated athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors and various Russian institutions, including the country’s anti-doping agency and an accredited laboratory in Moscow that handled testing for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. It detailed payments to conceal doping tests and arrangements by which athletes were made aware of when they would be tested, in violation of code which dictates they be spontaneous, and also the destruction of samples.
Key Figures in the Russian Doping Scandal
Here is a look at the officials and athletes named in the World Anti-Doping Association’s report on Russian doping.
The report also said that members of Russian law enforcement agencies were present in the Moscow lab and involved in the efforts to interfere with the integrity of the samples, creating “an atmostphere of intimidation” on lab processes and staff members.
“What made these allegations even more egregious was the knowledge that the government of the Russian Federation provides direct funding and oversight for the above institutions, thus suggesting that the federal government was not only complicit in the collusion, but that it was effectively a state-sponsored regime,” the report said.
It recommended WADA impose lifetime bans for five coaches and five athletes, including the gold and bronze medalists from the women’s 800 meters at the 2012 London Olympics.
Mr. Pound also said on Monday that the World Anti-Doping Agency had negotiated a cooperation agreement with Interpol and handed over extensive documents and evidence. “This is not he-said, she-said,” Mr. Pound said. Interpol confirmed that cooperation with its own announcement on Monday.
Russian athletes, in soaring numbers, have been caught doping in recent years. Russia had far more drug violations than any other country in 2013: 225, or 12 percent of all violations globally, according to data from the World Anti-Doping Agency. About a fifth of Russia’s infractions involved track and field athletes, the focus of Monday’s report.
“This level of corruption attacks sport at its core,” Richard H. McLaren, a Canadian lawyer and co-author of the report, said in an interview on Sunday. In contrast to corporate governance scandals like those currently roiling world soccer, he said, drug use by athletes has distorted the essence of professional games. “Bribes and payoffs don’t change actual sporting events,” Mr. McLaren said. “But doping takes away fair competition and an equal playing field.”
The report released Monday was the result of a 10-month investigation by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency. Its inquiry stemmed from a December 2014 documentary by the German public broadcaster ARD, which drew on accounts from Russian athletes, coaches and anti-doping authorities, who said that the government had helped procure drugs for athletes and cover up positive test results.
Further allegations emerged in August, when ARD and the Sunday Times of London released another report more broadly focused on the leaked results of thousands of international athletes’ blood tests dating to 2001, showing decorated athletes in good standing with suspicious drug tests. Those allegations are also being investigated by the independent commission, but the results were not included in Monday’s report, as the inquiry is ongoing, the agency said.
Russia Is the Violations Leader
In June 2015, the World Anti-Doping Agency released its first set of statistics on doping violations. The violations, taken from 2013 data, included 115 countries and 89 sports. Russia had the highest number of violations -- 225 across 30 sports -- with 42 of them coming from track and field events.
Violations
PCT. OF WORLD TOTAL
COUNT
Rank
Country
11.5
9.6
5.5
4.9
4.8
4.3
3.4
2.8
2.4
2.4
2.2
2.1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
%
Russia
Turkey
France
India
Belgium
Italy
Spain
Poland
Kazakhstan
South Africa
United States
Portugal
225
188
108
95
94
83
67
55
47
46
43
40
Russia’s 2013 violations by sport
42
35
32
26
19
14
57
Track and Field*
Power lifting
Wrestling
Weight lifting
Cycling
Aquatics
Other
The three-person commission, chaired by Mr. Pound, a Canadian lawyer and founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, also included Mr. McLaren, who teaches law at Western University in Ontario, and Günter Younger, head of cybercrime with the Bavarian Landeskriminalamt, a regional division of the German criminal police.
The World Anti-Doping foundation and executive board will decide whether to act on the commission’s recommendations; they are scheduled to meet next week in Colorado Springs, Colo., an event that motivated the timing of the commission’s report, Mr. Pound said.
Mr. Pound did not offer any timeframe for the recommended suspension of Russia’s athletic federation. He said he thought if Russia did not fight the recommendations, he thought it could be possible for Russian athletes to compete in Brazil.
“If they do the surgery and do the therapy, I hope they can get there and compete,” he said. “The idea is not to exclude people from the Olympics if you can avoid that, but sometimes if the conduct is not corrected, that’s the price you pay for it.”
“The outcome may be there are no Russian track and field athletes in Rio.”
The commission also recommended that the Russian anti-doping authority be declared non-code-compliant, indefinitely, and that the director of the Moscow laboratory be removed from his job, and that the lab lose its accreditation.
The commission met with Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s minister of sports, before releasing its report, Mr. Pound said. “We advised the minister in advance that he would not likely be pleased with many of the finds,” Mr. Pound said. “We hope Russia will seize the opportunity to move forward and take a lead in attacking a problem that has the potential to destroy sport.”
Criminal proceedings may come in the wake of Monday’s report, and some investigations have already begun based on the evidence collected by the panel. Last week, French authorities announced they had opened a criminal inquiry into the former president of track and field’s world governing body, Lamine Diack of Senegal, for having allegedly accepted bribes to allow at least six Russian athletes to compete, including in the 2012 London Olympics.
DOCUMENT
World Anti-Doping Agency Report on Russian Doping Program
The report described a pervasive doping culture among Russia’s sports programs and implicated athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors and various Russian institutions.
Dr. Gabriel Dollé, the former director of the medical and anti-doping division of the governing body, is also under investigation, French authorities said, along with Mr. Diack’s legal counsel.
Though lifetime bans for athletes and coaches were recommended, Mr. Pound said that in the case of financial prizes, “the money’s gone, and whoever ought to have won, didn’t.”
The Russian Ministry of Sport did not respond to a request for immediate comment. But the initial reaction in Russia fell in line with the tradition since Soviet times, namely to blame any such revelations on a Western plot to undermine the country’s accomplished athletes.
Igor Ananskikh, a member of the youth policy and sports committee of the State Duma, or parliament, said: “Recommendations can remain recommendations. It is all connected with the fact that Russian athletes demonstrate such good results, some countries are not satisfied with it.”
Nikolai Valuev, a former Russian heavyweight boxing champion now serving as a deputy in the Duma, said on state-run Rossiya 24 television, “In recent times I hear only about investigations of Russian athletes, this has already become a system, too.”
“First of all,” he said, “we must conduct a broad investigation to find out whether the results of the investigation are true.”
Days before Monday’s report was published, however, Russia’s athletics federation suspended five athletes, including a noted distance runner, Maria Konovalova.
“The Russians themselves have said there are vestiges of the old Soviet system, old-guard coaches who haven’t changed and can’t change,” Mr. McLaren said. “The minister of sport says their way of operating is over. But read our report.”
Russia has had a particularly prominent place in the international sports spotlight in recent years, hosting the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014 and the track and field world championship in Moscow the year before. The country is due to host the next World Cup, in 2018, though Swiss authorities are investigating allegations that it may have secured the tournament through under-the-table agreements.
Mr. Pound declined to say whether he thought Russia should be stripped of its status as host of the 2018 World Cup. “I think FIFA’s got to sort out its own difficulties — without our help,” he said.
The Moscow testing laboratory implicated in Monday’s report was previously scrutinized and provisionally banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, in 2013. It conducted drug testing during both the Sochi Olympics and track and field championships, and it is set to oversee testing for FIFA during the coming World Cup. The lab did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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