Translated material
The former head of the anti-doping center spoke about doping by 15 Russian medalists at the Sochi Games
Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, said that at least 15 Russian medalists at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics were doped. It is reported by The New York Times.
According to Rodchenkov, the athletes took a cocktail of three banned drugs that he developed. The program allegedly involved 14 ski team members and two bobsledders. The material names the names of bobsledder Alexander Zubkov, skier Alexander Legkov and skeletonist Alexander Tretyakov. In addition, the women's hockey team, which took sixth place in the competition, allegedly used doping.
According to Rodchenkov, he received a list of names of athletes participating in the "program" two weeks before the Olympics. If an athlete from the list won a medal, he had to replace his doping test.
Rodchenkov alleges that during the Olympics at night, doping experts and intelligence officers substituted urine samples taken by athletes for analysis with other samples collected several months earlier.
In total, according to him, at least one hundred "dirty" urine samples were destroyed during the games.
The publication notes that Rodchenkov's claims could not be verified. At the same time, the former head of the anti-doping laboratory provided the publication with documents, according to him, from the Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation, with the details of the program.
Dr. Rodchenkov described his work in Sochi as a "major achievement", the pinnacle of a decade-long effort to develop a Russian doping strategy for international competition.
- The Russian team took first place at the Winter Olympics in Sochi in terms of the number of gold (13) and silver (11) medals, as well as in the overall medal standings (33).
- On May 8, the American channel CBS aired a story in which Vitaly Stepanov, a former employee of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), referring to Grigory Rodchenkov, said that at least four Russian champions of the Winter Olympics in Sochi 2014 used illegal drugs.
- The International Olympic Committee told the Associated Press that it is ready to retest samples from the Sochi Olympics if there is evidence of manipulation. “We need to see if reanalysis will help us to make sure that there were manipulations,” the IOC said.
- Grigory Rodchenkov resigned from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory in the fall of 2015 after the publication of a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on the situation in Russian sports. There, in particular, it was said that he gave the order to destroy 1417 doping samples of Russian athletes. He later moved to the USA.
- The WADA report also stated that during the Sochi Olympics, the work of the anti-doping agency's laboratories was monitored by "FSB officers posing as engineers."
- After the publication of the WADA report, Russian athletes were suspended from all competitions under the auspices of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).