Russia on Thursday night stood accused of yet another audacious state-sponsored doping cover-up after the disgraced former head of its national anti-doping laboratory admitted conspiring with its secret service to supply drugs to dozens of competitors and swap dirty samples for clean ones during the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, who was at the centre of the scandal which last year led to his country being banned from world athletics, told the New York Times at least 15 of the nation’s 33 medal winners at the 2014 event were part of a sophisticated programme set up to ensure success on home soil.
Rodchenkov admitted involvement in a dead-of-night operation in which anti-doping experts and members of Russia’s intelligence services broke into supposedly tamper-proof bottles to surreptitiously replace 100 urine samples that were tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier.
The former director of the Moscow laboratory – which had its accreditation revoked by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) last month after Rodchenkov was found to have intentionally destroyed hundreds of athletes’ samples – laid bare how he and others worked in Sochi for hours each night, passing bottles of urine through a hand-sized hole in a wall.
He admitted the elaborate plot was years in the making and also involved him developing a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with alcoholic spirits and gave to dozens of Russian athletes before both the 2012 London Olympics and in Sochi two years later.
He alleged the cover-up involved some of Russia’s biggest stars of the Winter Games – where it topped the medal table after finishing sixth in 2010 – including 14 cross-country skiers and two bobsledders.
Source ; Telegraph
Russia Hit By Fresh Doping Allegations
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