Doping in Russia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Doping in Russia has cost the country 51 Olympic medals, stripped after investigations revealed systematic fraud. That number is four times the total of the next-highest nation. It also represents more than 30% of all medals stripped at the Olympic Games worldwide. Russia holds yet another record. More than 150 of its competitors have been caught doping at the Olympics, the highest figure for any country in the world. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia's main anti-doping laboratory, told investigators something remarkable. Urine samples had been swapped through a hole cut into a laboratory wall at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Who ordered it? How did such a vast operation stay hidden for so long? And when the evidence finally emerged, what did world sport choose to do about it?

• 2. The Chemists' Games

  ›

  A KGB colonel admitted that Soviet intelligence officers had posed as anti-doping officials from the International Olympic Committee. British journalist Andrew Jennings reported that Soviet athletes had been rescued from drug tests with 'tremendous efforts'. A 1989 Australian study reached a stark conclusion about the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Its authors wrote that the event 'might as well have been called the Chemists' Games'. They found that almost no gold medal winner had competed free of performance-enhancing drugs.

  Documents obtained in 2016 revealed Soviet preparations for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union had drafted a plan for a statewide doping system in athletics. Those plans were compiled before the country decided to boycott those Games. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, addressed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. The document detailed existing steroid operations and proposed ways to expand them. Decades later, Portugalov would be named as one of the main figures organising Russia's doping program ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

  In October 2009, IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss wrote to Valentin Balakhnichev that Russian blood samples had 'recorded some of the highest values ever seen' since the IAAF began testing.

• 3. The Whistleblowers

  ›

  In December 2012, Darya Pishchalnikova sent WADA an email detailing an alleged state-run doping program in Russia. According to The New York Times, the message reached three senior WADA officials. They chose not to open an inquiry. Instead, the agency forwarded her email to the Russian sports officials she had been accusing. Within months, Pishchalnikova was handed a ten-year ban by the Russian Athletics Federation. She had already served a two-year ban from 2008 to 2010. The new penalty arrived shortly after her disclosure to WADA, in what appeared to be retaliation.

  Vitaly Stepanov, an employee at Russia's anti-doping agency RUSADA, had been sending information to WADA since 2010. He said he sent two hundred emails and fifty letters over three years. His wife, Yuliya Stepanova, made secret recordings of conversations with Russian athletics officials. One recording captured Russian athlete Mariya Savinova saying that contacts at a Moscow drug-testing laboratory had covered up her positive results.

  Those recordings appeared in an ARD documentary broadcast on the 3rd of December 2014. The film was titled 'Geheimsache Doping: Wie Russland seine Sieger macht', or 'The Doping Secret: How Russia Creates its Champions'. The documentary reported that Russian officials had supplied banned substances in exchange for 5% of an athlete's earnings. Tests had been falsified in cooperation with doping control officers. Russian long-distance runner Liliya Shobukhova allegedly paid 450,000 euros to have a positive result covered up.

  WADA's chief investigator Jack Robertson had helped make the film possible. Robertson believed his own organisation was reluctant to act and that media attention was needed. With permission from director-general David Howman, he approached Hajo Seppelt of ARD, who had previously reported on doping in East Germany and other countries. Stepanov later recalled that even within WADA, 'there were people who didn't want this story out'.

  Grigory Rodchenkov went further than any of the others. He was fired by Russian authorities and fled to the United States. Filmmaker Bryan Fogel helped document his account, resulting in the film Icarus. Rodchenkov told The New York Times about Yuri Nagornykh, Russia's deputy minister of sport. Nagornykh had pressed Rodchenkov to fabricate a positive doping result against Ukrainian competitor Vita Semerenko. Rodchenkov refused. He later reflected: 'I could not have done this to an innocent athlete.' He added: 'During my career, I reported many Dirty Samples as clean, but never the other way around.'

  In November 2015, France opened a criminal investigation into Lamine Diack, the former president of the IAAF. Investigators alleged that Diack took one million euros from Russian athletics officials in 2011 to cover up positive results for at least six athletes.

• 4. The Disappearing Positive

  ›

  Richard McLaren, a Canadian attorney retained by WADA, published his findings on the 18th of July 2016. McLaren worked within a 57-day time limit. He concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia's Ministry of Sport had coordinated a system to protect doped competitors. The Federal Security Service and the Centre of Sports Preparation were both part of it. The WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow served the same operation. McLaren called the method at its centre the 'disappearing positive methodology', or DPM.

  The Berlinger Group made the tamper-resistant bottles used in official anti-doping tests. Their containers were designed so any unauthorised opening would leave visible damage. The DPM worked around this. Berlinger said publicly that the company had no knowledge of the specifications, methods, or procedures involved in the McLaren Commission's tests. McLaren stated that the DPM had operated from 'at least late 2011 to August 2015'. During that period it was applied to 643 positive samples, a figure McLaren considered only a minimum because Russian records were not fully accessible.

  Athletics accumulated the highest total of covered-up positives, at 139. Weightlifting followed at 117. The scheme reached into non-Olympic sports (37 cases), Paralympic competition (35), wrestling (28), cycling (26), skating (24), and swimming (18). It extended to ice hockey (14), biathlon (10), and even curling (2) and sailing (1). On the 9th of December 2016, McLaren published a second report. It found that more than 1,000 Russian competitors had benefited from the cover-up between 2011 and 2015. McLaren later qualified that claim in legal proceedings. He clarified that evidence a competitor 'may have benefited' from the scheme did not prove that they actually had.

  Emails reviewed during the investigation suggested the cover-up may have reached five blind powerlifters and a fifteen-year-old competitor. Both groups may have been given banned substances without their knowledge.

• 5. Punishment and Its Limits

  ›

  On the 9th of November 2015, WADA published a 335-page report prepared by its independent commission under Dick Pound. The investigation found widespread doping and large-scale cover-ups by Russian authorities. It documented that the Federal Security Service had visited laboratory staff and instructed some of them not to cooperate with WADA investigators. Staff members told the commission they suspected their offices and phones had been bugged.

  On the 13th of November, the IAAF council voted 22-1 to ban Russia from world track and field events. Russia also lost the right to host the 2016 World Race Walking Team Championships in Cheboksary and the 2016 World Junior Championships in Kazan. WADA suspended RUSADA on the 18th of November, leaving Russia without a functioning national anti-doping body in any sport.

  In January 2016, the IAAF issued lifetime bans to Valentin Balakhnichev and coach Aleksey Melnikov. Two former directors of RUSADA, Vyacheslav Sinev and Nikita Kamaev, both died unexpectedly in February. Before his death, Kamaev had reportedly approached The Sunday Times with plans to publish a book on 'the true story of sport pharmacology and doping in Russia since 1987'.

  On the 7th of August 2016, the IOC cleared 278 Russian competitors to participate at the Rio Olympics. One hundred and eleven were excluded, including 67 removed by the IAAF before the IOC even acted. The IOC had rejected WADA's recommendation to ban Russia outright, delegating each decision to individual sports federations instead. Critics noted the contrast with Kuwait, whose team had been banned from Rio for government interference in a non-doping matter.

  Sir Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee, moved more decisively than the IOC. On the 7th of August, his Governing Board voted unanimously to ban Russia's entire team from the 2016 Summer Paralympics. Craven called the Russian anti-doping system 'entirely compromised'. He described the 18th of July 2016 as 'one of the darkest days in the history of all sport'. Todd Nicholson, chair of the IPC's Athletes' Council, said Russia had used its competitors as 'pawns in order to show global prowess'. A German court later dismissed an appeal by ten Russian competitors, ruling that the IPC had 'comprehensibly justified' its decision.

  On the 5th of December 2017, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee from the 2018 Winter Olympics. Those Russians with no prior violations and a consistent testing history could compete under the Olympic flag. Their designation was 'Olympic Athletes from Russia', or OAR. The Russian flag, anthem, and government officials were all excluded. Of 500 Russians initially put forward for consideration, 169 received invitations to compete. Speed skater Olga Graf then withdrew. She said the sport had 'become a bargaining chip in dirty political games', bringing the final total to 168.

  WADA's definitive ban came in December 2019. Russia was barred from all major international sporting events for four years for tampering with doping data. Russia appealed. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, in December 2020, reduced the penalty to two years. Russian competitors at the 2020 Summer Olympics competed under the acronym ROC. On the 22nd of April 2021, the IOC approved a fragment of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 to replace the Russian national anthem at those Games.

  World Athletics lifted Russia's doping suspension on the 23rd of March 2023. The ban had been in place for nearly seven and a half years, since November 2015. Russian track and field athletes remained barred from international competition, now because of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine rather than any anti-doping violation.

• 6. A Nation in Denial

  ›

  Vladimir Putin denied all state involvement in doping. He insisted the country had never supported doping at the state level and never would. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed the United States 'fears honest competition'. He said Washington had used its influence within the IOC to 'orchestrate the doping scandal'.

  Russia's parliamentary foreign affairs committee chairman Aleksey Pushkov called the IAAF ban 'an act of political revenge against Russia for its independent foreign policy'. Vadim Dengin, a member of Russia's parliament, described the entire scandal as 'a pure falsification, invented to discredit and humiliate Russia'.

  The Levada Center, an independent polling organisation, found that 14% of Russians believed their competitors had doped at Sochi. Seventy-one percent did not believe WADA's reports. A spokesman for Putin called whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova a 'Judas'. Stepanova said that all the news stories were calling her 'a traitor and not just traitor but a traitor to the Motherland'. A poll by Komsomolskaya Pravda found that 86% of the Russian population opposed competing at the 2018 Winter Olympics under a neutral flag.

  Pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva called for Stepanova to be 'banned for life'. After Russia's appeal was dismissed, she addressed foreign competitors directly. 'Let all those pseudo-clean foreign athletes breathe a sigh of relief and win their pseudo gold medals in our absence', she wrote. She added: 'They always did fear strength.'

  Hajo Seppelt, who had produced the ARD documentaries, had the impression that he and the Stepanovs 'were being styled as enemies of the state'. Dick Pound, former WADA president, compared Russia to a driver caught speeding who asks: 'Why me? Everyone else was doing it.' Leonid Bershidsky, a Russian writer for Bloomberg View, urged his country's officials to understand that 'whataboutism doesn't avert investigations'.

  WADA's director general Olivier Niggli told Norway's NRK broadcaster in August 2016 that Russia was 'threatening us and our informers'. He cited daily hacking attempts and efforts to bug houses. The agency had, Niggli said, 'a pretty good suspicion' that the hackers were Russian. He added: 'For the moment they are sending out completely the wrong signals.'