Short answers, pulled from the story.
Russia has had 51 Olympic medals stripped following investigations into systematic doping fraud. That figure is more than four times the total of any other country and represents over 30% of all Olympic medals stripped globally. More than 150 Russian competitors have been caught doping at the Olympic Games, the highest total for any nation.
The disappearing positive methodology (DPM) was a system in which Russia's Ministry of Sport, the Federal Security Service, and the WADA-accredited Moscow laboratory coordinated the erasure of positive drug tests. The McLaren report found the DPM operated from at least late 2011 to August 2015 and was applied to 643 positive samples across more than 30 sports, with athletics (139 cases) and weightlifting (117 cases) recording the highest counts.
Grigory Rodchenkov was the director of Russia's prominent anti-doping laboratory, described by WADA as 'the heart of Russian doping.' He was fired by Russian authorities after the scandal emerged and fled to the United States, where filmmaker Bryan Fogel documented his account in the 2017 film Icarus. Rodchenkov told investigators that at least fifteen medalists at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were involved in the cover-up scheme.
The IOC declined WADA's recommendation for a full ban and delegated each decision to individual sports federations. On the 7th of August 2016, 278 Russian competitors were cleared to compete while 111 were excluded. The International Paralympic Committee took a stricter approach, voting unanimously on the same day to ban Russia's entire Paralympic team from the 2016 Summer Paralympics.
Vitaly Stepanov, a RUSADA employee, sent WADA more than two hundred emails and fifty letters about systemic doping from 2010 onward. His wife Yuliya Stepanova made secret recordings of Russian athletics officials that appeared in an ARD documentary broadcast on the 3rd of December 2014. Darya Pishchalnikova had emailed WADA as early as December 2012, and Grigory Rodchenkov, the Moscow laboratory director, later provided additional evidence documented in the film Icarus.
In December 2019, WADA banned Russia from all major international sporting events for four years for tampering with data from its Moscow anti-doping laboratory. Russia appealed, and in December 2020 the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced the sanction to two years. Russian competitors participated at the 2020 Summer Olympics and 2022 Winter Olympics under the acronym ROC, with a fragment of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 replacing the Russian national anthem.