Released on conditions and caught again? The first doping case at the Winter Games again has Russia as the main suspect. Prohibited substances have been a common thread running through the nation’s sports history for decades. An insight into the methods of the master cheaters: from KGB intelligence to baby bottles with urine and mouse holes.
Let’s start with a telling fact: in the past 46 Olympic medals have been taken from Russian athletes after proven doping use.
That is more than 30% of the total and almost four times the number of “vice champions” Ukraine and Belarus.
Doping is an undeniable blot on the country’s sporting history.
Ironically, the 1980 Olympics in Moscow are unofficially the cleanest in history. The first and only quadrennial sports event where no athlete tested positive.
The Chemical Games
More than forty years later, evidence and common sense have long shattered that vision.
An Australian government report later concluded that the event was more appropriately called the “The Chemical Games”.
Testimonials also showed that the KGB did everything it could to ensure that the Games ran smoothly in order to polish the image of the communist Soviet Union.
The Secret Service had even set up a special department to monitor the anti-doping lab. Almost all official tests were destroyed and replaced with clean ones.
Nevertheless, Russian doping use remains under the radar for years. There are many conjectures, but there is hardly any evidence.
How clean were the Moscow Olympics really?
Whistleblowers
We jump to 2014, when the Games will take place again in Russia. This time the winter version in Sochi. And again the host proudly finishes at the top of the medal standings, but this time he can’t shamelessly enjoy the triumph.
A few months later, the German television channel ARD comes with a shocking documentary. About massive and systematic doping, controlled by the Russian state.
Several witnesses admit to being constantly prepared and to know of falsified doping tests.
Whistleblower Vitaly Stepanov appears to have been sending information about the entire case to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) since 2010. Just like discus thrower Darya Pitchalnikova. Only WADA did not open an investigation, but passed the hot potato to Russian sports leaders…
What did they do? Pitchalnikova imposed an unprecedented 10-year suspension in 2013 for doping use, causing her to lose her Olympic medal. An act of revenge against the “traitor”?
Urine in bottles for Sochi plan
The ARD report opened a Pandora’s box.
A 300-page report from WADA confirmed claims of an entrenched doping culture by a network of athletes, trainers, doctors and government officials.
More and more key figures would no longer be silent. Grigory Rodchenkov, ex-director of the Russian doping lab and now in hiding as a key witness in the US, is said to have released remarkable details about the frauds.
He doped many Russian participants for the 2014 Games by giving them a cocktail of three anabolic steroids – metenolone, trenbolone and oxandrolone.
Meanwhile, during periods when the athletes were not doping, the athletes collected clean urine from baby food jars and used soda bottles. After all, that was an essential part of the shrewd “Sochi plan”.
During the Games, the Russians installed a room next to the secure lab where all samples were kept. In the middle of the night, a Russian official entered the room to pass the “dirty” samples through a covered mouse hole in the wall to Rodchenkov and some colleagues.
They opened the sealed bottles and replaced the contents with old, “clean” urine from the athletes. Sometimes with the addition of salt to keep the same weight.
Researchers later found effective scratches and remarkably high salt concentrations in some preserved samples.
Cheating with data
Since the conscious revelations, the Russians have become pariahs in the sports world. An exceptional performance is almost immediately questioned.
The whole thing also had serious consequences. Especially because the defense of Russia did not make a good impression. To be rehabilitated, the cheater had to grant WADA access to the database of the anti-doping lab in Moscow.
Only Russia missed a first deadline. And when the door was opened, it soon turned out that the data had been tampered with.
Old habits die hard.
The WADA verdict in 2019 is therefore harsh: a four-year suspension from all major sporting events, which would later be halved by the International Sports Tribunal.
Only Russian athletes who can prove they are clean are allowed to compete under a neutral flag.
Even that may not be enough. Kamila Valijeva’s case at the Winter Games casts Russia in a negative light for the umpteenth time.
It will soon be clear whether the figure skater is actually guilty. But given the past, she has the perception against it anyway.
Because who still believes Russia?
