JUST when you thought nothing could surprise you any longer about the Russian doping story, along comes part two of the McLaren report. The number of athletes, across 30 sports, now thought to be involved in, or reaping the benefit from, what the Canadian law professor calls in his independent report "an institutional conspiracy" now stretches into four figures. But it was the detail which was as diverting as the headlines yesterday.
The startling lengths to which the Russian authorities went to boost their athletes' performances, and cover up the conspiracy, were laid out in minute detail for the world to see. Did you know, for instance, that two Russian female ice hockey players at their home Winter Olympics in Sochi provided male urine samples? Or that salt and instant coffee granules were added to clean urine samples to match the appearance of positive tests, providing readings which were physiologically impossible? What about the existence of a clean urine bank which was kept in a Moscow refrigerator? Or the potent cocktail of drugs with a very short detection window known as the "Duchess" which was developed to assist athletes in evading the testers and could be wheeled out at short notice?
According to the first part of the report, based on information received from Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, a former director of the anti-doping laboratory at Sochi 2014, positive tests could be secreted through "mouse holes" drilled in test tubes by an FSB agent disguised as a sewer engineer. The tamper proof lids could be breached in a manner which didn't break the seal and replaced with clean samples.
If it all reads like something straight out of a John Le Carre cold war espionage novel then that must be because, to all intents and purposes, the relationship between Russia and the West, particularly Europe, has descended into a very similar pattern of mutual distrust. There was no mention in the report of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and no "direct evidence" that Vitaly Mutko, then Russian sports minister and now promoted to deputy prime minster, knew of the doping programme, even if his department clearly did.
But perhaps it was utterly expected that State Duma deputy Igor Lebedev should claim yesterday that the report only shows that "that they have no facts and no evidence" and asked for "all Russians' favourite Donald Trump to put an end to this". Whether the wider Russian public will buy all this, they are bombarded with it via their media outlets on a daily basis and Trump seems unlikely to force the issue.
Russia won 72 medals at the London Olympics, 21 of which were gold, and 33 medals at Sochi, 13 of which were gold. Yet the IOC resisted calls for a blanket ban against that country's competitors competing at the Rio Olympics, leaving it up to individual sporting governing bodies to make their own determinations. The International Paralympic Committee charted a different course, though, their ban provoking the Russian authorities to host their own sporting event, the All Russian Open Paralympic Competition at the Federal Training Centre in Novogorsk, in front of a crowd of bussed-in students from the Russian Ministry of Civil Defence.
"The full findings of the report are unprecedented and astonishing," said an International Paralympic Committee statement. "They strike right at the heart of the integrity and ethics of sport. We wholeheartedly agree with Professor McLaren that the best course of action is to work together to fix the broken and compromised anti-doping system in Russia."
By contrast the IAAF statement seemed rather timid. All 1,000-plus names have not been made public, merely handed out to the sports federations to decide their own next course of action. "The IAAF agrees with Prof. McLaren that it is time that this manipulation stops and with this aim has been working in close cooperation with Prof. McLaren’s team and WADA and continues to do so," it read. "Based on the individual athletes that Prof. McLaren’s team have shared with us, over half (53%) of the elite athletes have already been sanctioned or are currently undergoing disciplinary proceedings. We will follow up on the rest as soon as the evidence from the IP’s investigation is made available to us via WADA."
For McLaren, international sports competitions had been "unknowingly hijacked by the Russians" and sports fans have been "deceived" for years. London 2012 in particular, so bright and shiny at the time, bore witness to corruption on a grand scale.
And just perhaps football will soon be in the firing line. The McLaren report referenced 30 instances of doping in football but gave little detail, other than to say that decisions will have to be made by the football organisations who sent the evidence. But is there any will on behalf of Fifa to deal with this matter before they too come under the microscope? Perhaps in time Scotland will have cause to be glad that we weren't good enough to reach the 2018 World Cup.
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