LOS ANGELES — Dozens of
Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15
medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned
for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the
country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.
The director, Grigory
Rodchenkov, who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of
Olympians, said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he
mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes, helping to
facilitate one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports
history.
It involved some of Russia’s
biggest stars of the Games, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team
and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds.
In a dark-of-night operation,
Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence services
surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs
with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly
tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr.
Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit
by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the
wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.
By the end of the Games, Dr.
Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.
None of the athletes were
caught doping. More important, Russia won the most medals of the Games, easily
surpassing its main rival, the United States, and undermining the integrity of
one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.
“People are celebrating
Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,”
Dr. Rodchenkov said. “Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?”
After The New York Times asked
Russian officials to respond to the claims, Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly
Mutko, released a statement to the news media calling the revelations “a
continuation of the information attack on Russian sport.”
Dr. Rodchenkov laid out the
details of the operation over three days of interviews that were arranged by an
American filmmaker, Bryan Fogel, who is working on a documentary that involves
Dr. Rodchenkov.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s account could
not be independently verified, but it was consistent with the broad findings of
a report published last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency. He provided The
Times with emails detailing doping efforts and a spreadsheet that he said was
sent to him by the sports ministry before the Sochi Games. It named the
athletes involved in the doping program.
Dr. Rodchenkov described his
own work at Sochi as a “strong accomplishment,” the apex of a decade-long
effort to perfect Russia’s doping strategy at international competitions.
“We were fully equipped,
knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly prepared for Sochi like never before,”
he said. “It was working like a Swiss watch.”
After Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov was awarded the
prestigious Order of Friendship by President Vladimir V. Putin.
Six months ago, however, he had a dramatic change in
fortune.
In November, the World Anti-Doping Agency identified
Dr. Rodchenkov as the linchpin in what it described as an extensive
state-sponsored doping program in Russia, accusing
him of extorting money from athletes — the only accusation he denies — as well
as covering up positive drug tests and destroying hundreds of urine samples.
After the report came
out, Dr. Rodchenkov said, Russian officials forced him to resign. Fearing for
his safety, he moved to Los Angeles, with the help of Mr. Fogel.
Back in Russia, two of Dr. Rodchenkov’s close
colleagues died unexpectedly in February, within weeks of each other; both were
former antidoping officials, one who resigned soon after Dr. Rodchenkov fled
the country.
The November report was primarily focused on track and
field, but Dr. Rodchenkov described the whole spectrum of Russian sport as
tainted by banned substances. Admitting to more than what WADA investigators
accused him of, he said it was not hundreds of urine samples that he destroyed
but rather several thousand, in last-ditch efforts to mask the extent of the
country’s doping.
Dr. Rodchenkov said he received the spreadsheet naming
athletes on the doping program on Jan. 21, 2014, two weeks before the Games and
shortly after he arrived in Sochi to begin work at the Olympic laboratory. It
was to be used for reference during competition, Dr. Rodchenkov said, and
outlined the competition schedule for each athlete. If any of them won a medal,
their urine samples had to be substituted.
Until now, a precise accounting of how Russian
officials could have executed such a complex doping operation was not publicly
known.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s
revelations, his first public comments since fleeing, come at a crucial moment
for Russia. In November, in the wake of the WADA report, the country was
provisionally suspended from international track and field competition; in the
coming weeks, leaders of the sport’s global governing body will decide whether
to lift a ban ahead of this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Russia is also preparing to host the next World Cup,
in 2018.
Responding to the cascade of accusations, Mr. Putin
called for an inquiry, but Russian officials have been largely dismissive of
claims about widespread doping by the country’s athletes.
The Times submitted questions about the revelations to
the sports ministry and six of its sports federations whose athletes were
identified as part of the doping program. Instead of responding directly, Mr.
Mutko, the minister, organized a news conference with journalists from the state-run
news agency TASS, calling the Times inquiry baseless and suggesting it was part
of an attempt to discredit Russian sports ahead of the Rio Games.
“The system of
organization of the Olympic Games was completely transparent,” Mr. Mutko told
TASS. “Everything was under the control of international experts — from the
collection of samples to their analysis.”
Dr. Rodchenkov said the sports ministry actively
guided the doping effort. In the six months before the Games, he said, he met
with Mr. Mutko’s deputy, Yuri Nagornykh, in a second-floor office at the
ministry’s palatial Moscow headquarters at least once a week.
In an email, Mr. Nagornykh
denied the existence of a doping program. “I have nothing to hide,” he wrote.
Russian officials were under
enormous pressure ahead of the Games. Sochi was to be a showcase of Russia’s
resurgence as a global power, and the entire country was enlisted in the
project. Billions of dollars were spent transforming the shabby subtropical
resort town into a winter sports paradise. Mr. Putin himself had negotiated
Russia’s Olympic bid and was personally involved in much of the planning.
Hanging over everything was
Russia’s disastrous sixth-place finish in the medal count at the previous
Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, British Columbia. It would not matter if the
world was wowed by the opening ceremony, or if the ski lifts ran smoothly.
Dr. Rodchenkov said it was up
to him to ensure that Russian athletes won the most medals, preferably gold
ones.
He had been the director of
Russia’s antidoping laboratory in Moscow since 2005, and was widely considered
among the world’s top experts in performance-enhancing drugs. He often
experimented with such drugs on himself, he said.
He published papers in
peer-reviewed journals, traveled often to scientific conferences abroad and was
a frequent guest at the annual antidoping symposium organized by the United
States Anti-Doping Agency, most recently in October in Lansdowne, Va., just a
month before he was forced to step down.
By his own admission, Dr.
Rodchenkov, who has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, used his expertise to help
athletes properly use banned substances and go undetected, which he says was
done at the behest of the Russian government. After years of trial and error,
he said, he developed a cocktail of three anabolic steroids — metenolone,
trenbolone and oxandrolone — that he claims many top-level Russian athletes
used leading up to the London Olympics in 2012 and throughout the Sochi Games.
The drugs, Dr. Rodchenkov
said, helped athletes recover quickly after grueling training regimens,
allowing them to compete in top form over successive days.
To speed up absorption of the
steroids and shorten the detection window, he dissolved the drugs in alcohol —
Chivas whiskey for men, Martini vermouth for women.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s formula was
precise: one milligram of the steroid mixture for every milliliter of alcohol.
The athletes were instructed to swish the liquid around in their mouths, under
the tongue, to absorb the drugs.
In the interviews, Dr.
Rodchenkov boasted about his ability to shield doped athletes from detection.
Even so, Russia had the highest number of athletes caught doping in 2014,
according to WADA statistics.
Dr. Rodchenkov said that some
of his athletes would at times take drugs he had not approved, making them vulnerable
to discovery. “All athletes are like small children,” he said. “They’ll put
anything you give them into their mouths.”
A case in point, he said, was Elena Lashmanova, a gold
medalist in racewalking at the 2012 London Games. She had tested positive for
banned substances while international observers were scrutinizing his lab, and
to cover up her results would have endangered the entire operation, he said.
In an email to Mr. Nagornykh, the deputy sports
minister, dated April 18, 2014, he wrote that there was nothing he could do to
protect Ms. Lashmanova without risking the lab’s accreditation.
“Honestly, this
lawlessness has reached its logical conclusion,” he wrote. “There can be no
second opinion about this.”
Three months later, Ms. Lashmanova was suspended from
international competition for two years.
Planning for Sochi
For Dr. Rodchenkov, preparations for Sochi began in
earnest in the fall of 2013. It was around that time, he said, that a man he
came to believe was working for the Russian internal intelligence service, the
F.S.B., began showing up at the lab in Moscow, inquiring about the bottles used
for storing the urine samples tested for banned substances.
The man took a particular interest in the toothed
metal rings that lock the bottles when the cap is twisted shut. He collected
hundreds of them, Dr. Rodchenkov said.
An employee at the lab, who spoke only on condition of
anonymity, fearing reprisals from the authorities, said that at some point it
was communicated to employees that the man was there to “protect the lab.” He
would pepper people with questions about the bottles, the employee said, but
always in a friendly way. While his motivations were not explicit, they
eventually became obvious to those working in the lab.
“It was clear that he was going to try to get into the
bottles,” the employee said.
At all major international athletic competitions,
athletes are required to submit a urine sample for testing. The sample is
divided into two bottles. One, the A bottle, is tested immediately; the other,
the B bottle, is sealed and stored for up to 10 years, in case the athlete’s
past performance is ever called into question. A Swiss company, Berlinger,
produces the self-locking glass bottles used for international competitions,
including the Olympics.
Because of the strict testing protocols at
competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said, athletes typically have to halt the use of
banned substances before an event to avoid testing positive. But in hosting the
Sochi Games, national sports officials saw an opportunity: They could control
the antidoping lab results, he said, and allow athletes to use
performance-enhancing drugs throughout competition.
Getting into the bottles was the key.
How exactly this was accomplished is still a mystery.
Dr. Rodchenkov claims that at some point several weeks before the start of the
Games, the man he believed to be an F.S.B. agent presented him with a
previously sealed bottle that had been opened, its uniquely numbered cap
intact.
“When I first time saw that bottle is open, I did not
believe my eyes,” he said, adding: “I truly believed this was tamper proof.”
Swapping Out Dirty Urine
In the months before
Sochi, according to the November WADA report, international doping officials
had threatened to revoke the accreditation of Dr. Rodchenkov’s lab because of
suspicious discrepancies in sample results and complaints of “external
interferences” in the lab’s operations. In November 2013, a disciplinary
committee convened in Johannesburg to review the case.
“Despite the substandard performance of the
laboratory, there was a distinct desire not to revoke the accreditation of the
laboratory prior to the Sochi Olympics,” last year’s WADA report said.
The testing laboratory for the Sochi Games had a staff
of nearly 100 people, including employees of Dr. Rodchenkov’s lab in Moscow as
well as dozens of international antidoping experts, flown in from cities like
Beijing; Doha, Qatar; and Lausanne, Switzerland.
Security was tight. There were numerous surveillance
cameras, and anyone wishing to enter the lab required security clearance.
An independent observer watched over the lab at random
times of day, WADA said, but rarely worked overnight during the roughly two
weeks of competition.
Dr. Rodchenkov said that each night, a sports ministry
official would send him a list of athletes whose samples needed to be swapped.
To match the individual athletes to their anonymous samples — which are coded
with a seven-digit number — Dr. Rodchenkov said that athletes snapped pictures
of their sample forms, including the code, and texted them to the ministry,
offering forbidden insight into whose urine was whose.
After receiving a signal that “the urines were ready,”
he changed from his lab coat into a Russian national team sweatshirt and left
his fourth-floor office, typically after midnight. He checked that the coast
was clear and made his way to Room 124, officially a storage space that he and
his team had converted into a shadow laboratory.
There, he said, with the room’s single window blacked
out with tape, the switch would be made.
A colleague stationed next door in the sample
collection room would retrieve the correct bottles and pass them into the
storage room through a circular hole cut through the wall near the floor, Dr.
Rodchenkov said. During the day, he said, the hole was concealed by a small
imitation-wood cabinet.
The sealed B bottles
were handed over to the man Dr. Rodchenkov believed was a Russian intelligence
officer, who would take them to an adjacent building. Within hours, Dr.
Rodchenkov said, the bottles were returned to the storage room, their caps
unlocked.
That man also supplied clean urine, collected from
each of the athletes months prior to the Olympics, before they started doping,
Dr. Rodchenkov said. It was delivered in soda bottles, baby formula bottles and
other miscellaneous containers, he said.
Making sure to keep the overhead light off, Dr.
Rodchenkov and a colleague dumped the tainted urine into a nearby toilet,
washed out the bottles, dried them with filter paper and filled them with the
clean urine.
He would then add table salt or water to balance out
any inconsistencies in the recorded specifications of the two samples.
Depending on what an athlete had consumed, two urine samples taken at different
times could vary.
Typically, the small team worked till dawn, breaking
only occasionally for instant coffee and cigarettes.
Victory
In the Sochi Games, Russian athletes won 33 medals —
including 13 golds, 10 more than at the previous Winter Olympics.
A third of all medals were awarded to athletes whose
names appeared on the spreadsheet outlining the government’s doping plan that
Dr. Rodchenkov said was provided by the sports ministry before the Games.
They included Alexander Zubkov, a veteran bobsledder
who won two golds; Alexander Legkov, a cross-country skier who won gold and
silver; and Alexander Tretyakov, who won gold in the skeleton competition.
Still, not all
athletes on the list won a medal. The entire women’s hockey team was doping
throughout the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov said. It finished in sixth place.
Efforts to reach these athletes and others through
their sports federations in Russia were unsuccessful. Several of the
federations replied and denied any wrongdoing by their athletes. A spokesperson
for the Russian Bobsled Federation said that all of its athletes “underwent
doping control procedures in accordance to the rules.”
“All of them were clean and not one positive result
was found.”
Southern California
After the Olympics, the praise directed at Dr.
Rodchenkov was effusive. He received commendations from not only Mr. Putin, but
also the International Olympic
Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency.
A subsequent report published by WADA called Sochi “a
milestone in the evolution of the Olympic Games antidoping program.”
The next year, however, WADA published a very
different report which said investigators had found systematic doping among
Russian track and field athletes. That inquiry, prompted by accusations from
two whistle-blowers in Russian athletics — first published by the German public
broadcaster ARD — put Dr. Rodchenkov squarely at the center of a national
conspiracy.
Within days, he was forced to resign, he said, and
fearing for his safety, fled to Los Angeles. His travel was arranged by Mr.
Fogel, whom he had first met just after Sochi, in 2014. Mr. Fogel was working
on a documentary seeking to expose shortcomings in drug-testing for
international sport — charting his own competition results with and without
banned drugs — and Dr. Rodchenkov served as his adviser.
In his six months in Los Angeles, Dr. Rodchenkov has
taken on a more active role in that documentary, “Icarus,” to be released in
September. He has otherwise spent his time gardening, making borscht and
writing in his diary.
Reflecting on his career, he said he was unapologetic
about his role in Russia’s doping program, considering it a condition of his
employment. To receive funding and support for his lab, he said, he had to do
the Kremlin’s bidding.
He had
occasionally, however, run afoul of the Russian authorities in his work. In
2011, he was investigated for trafficking in performance-enhancing drugs, and
he said he fully expected to go to prison. His sister was convicted and
imprisoned on similar charges.
The investigation into Dr.
Rodchenkov, however, disappeared.
He said he could not be sure
why, but he suspected that he had been spared punishment so that he could play
a crucial role at the Sochi Games.
“It’s my redemption: success
in Sochi,” he said. “Instead of being in prison, win at any cost.”
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