And the smell!..

This is the first time that the purpose of a large-scale counterintelligence operation was to replace urine in Olympic bottles.

In one of the episodes of the popular American series about Lieutenant Colombo, he solves a crime related to parapsychology. The subject of his investigation has brilliant abilities, which he just confirmed during the experiment.

The experiment consisted in the fact that three drivers in three different parts of the city were given a road atlas. Each driver had to put on a blindfold (to ensure randomness of choice), then, blindly, open the atlas on a random page, blindly put a dot on the atlas with a marker, bandage the atlas on the open page with an elastic band, and then drive to this point and, leaning out of the window , take pictures of the surroundings.

The picture was sent by fax; our phenomenon, the owner of parapsychological talents, sitting in the isolation chamber, had to draw what is in the picture.

And so it all happened, of course. Only - as Lieutenant Colombo managed to establish - it was not parapsychology at all, but pure fraud. All pages in the atlas were the same, and the dot was on them in advance, and the driver put on a blindfold not to ensure the randomness of the choice, but to avoid noticing the pre-marked dots.

At the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, the Russian team took 6th place in the team medal standings, and four years later, in Sochi, she was the first, having won 33 medals. There is reason to believe that this astonishing result, as in the Colombo series, was pure fraud.

According to the revelations of Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, published in The New York Times, the entire Olympic Games in Sochi were nothing more than a doping fraud on an especially large scale.

On the eve of the Games, each athlete submits urine for a doping test. This urine is divided into two samples: A and B. Sample A is opened immediately. Sample B is stored for 10 years. Urine bottles are produced by a special Swiss company Berlinger, and they are made in such a way that it is impossible to open them without damaging the caps with a unique number printed on it.

But what is impossible for a lone doctor is not particularly difficult for a state organization solving a problem of national importance.

According to Mr. Rodchenkov, preparations for victory in Sochi began in the fall of 2013. Then an FSB officer appeared in the RUSADA laboratory, who carefully studied the anti-doping procedures. He paid special attention to Berlinger bottles, or rather, metal rings with teeth, which compress the neck of the bottle after the cap is locked. He collected hundreds of caps and rings.

How exactly this complex engineering problem was solved, Grigory Rodchenkov, according to him, did not know, but a few weeks before the Olympics, the modest organizers of the victory from the FSB showed him a used bottle with a neatly opened and undamaged cap (Rodchenkov did not suspect that this was possible).

After that, the work began to boil. More than 100 people worked in the Anti-Doping Laboratory in Sochi, including a lot of foreigners. Video cameras hung everywhere, and unscheduled inspections often occurred. However, they never took place at night, and according to Rodchenkov, the organizers of the stunt took advantage of this.

A hole was cut into the wall of the room where the samples were stored. During the day, it was covered by a chipboard cabinet. After midnight, the locker was moved away, and Mr. Rodchenkov, having changed his white coat for a Russian sports uniform, went up to room No. 124, which was officially listed as a pantry. This closet has been turned into an underground laboratory.

Every evening, Rodchenkov received, he said, a paper from the ministry with a list of athletes whose samples were to be replaced. Doping tests are always anonymous: doctors in the lab don't have to know whose urine they're testing, and to solve this problem, Rodchenkov says, athletes took pictures of the code on the bottle and forwarded their text messages to the right person.

Rodchenkov and his men seized the bottles through a hole in the wall and handed them to a FSB officer, who took them to a neighboring building. A few hours later, the bottle was returned open, with the disposable cap intact. Compromising urine was poured right there into the toilet, the bottle was washed, disinfected ... and filled with urine taken from the right athlete several months ago, before he took doping.

Doping was also supplied by Rodchenkov, it was his own invention: three anabolic steroids, methenolone, trenbolone and oxalandrone, dissolved in whiskey at the rate of 1 milligram of the steroid mixture per 1 milliliter of whiskey. The men were given Chivas, the women Martini.

Sometimes there were punctures: either the athletes ate something on their own (athletes, like children, drag everything into their mouths, - Grigory Rodchenkov laments in an interview), and sometimes out of sheer bad luck. The doping test of Elena Lashmanova, for example, was opened at the time when the laboratory was visited by an international inspection, and Lashmanova had to sacrifice.

After the end of the Games, the Olympic Committee and WADA thanked Rodchenkov for the excellent organization. The corresponding WADA report called Sochi "an important milestone in the evolution of the Olympic Anti-Doping Program", and Rodchenkov was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship.

The reason why Rodchenkov split is also interesting: after WADA accused Moscow of systematically manipulating samples in November 2015, Rodchenkov was forced to resign, and two of his colleagues died suddenly. Rodchenkov did not wait to be found in a hotel room with a suicide note, and pulled off to Los Angeles. There he is now advising an American journalist named Vogel, whose documentary about doping fraud in Russian sports will be screened in September.

The most instructive thing in this whole story, in my opinion, is this: the special services of a particular country, by definition, are engaged in various secret affairs: they spy, commit political assassinations, obtain military secrets, etc. As far as I understand, this is the first time when the goal of a large-scale special operation was to replace ... urine in Olympic bottles.