Month: July 2020

No Russian athletes should be allowed to take part in the postponed Tokyo Olympics next year, says former doping mastermind turned whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov.

The architect of the country’s infamous state-sponsored doping scandal told BBC Sport the country had not changed despite being banned from all major sporting events for four years in December for manipulating laboratory data.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has ruled that Russian athletes who prove they are clean will be able to compete in Japan under a neutral flag.

In his first broadcast interview since the decision, Rodchenkov, the former head of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, said: “It should be an absolute blanket ban without any excuses or admissions of athletes.

“The same personnel who were smuggling and swapping samples during Sochi [the 2014 Winter Games], they were falsifying all documentation.

“It was a progression in falsifying, day by day, of this data – an incredible fraud of unspeakable proportion. It shows the country learns absolutely nothing.”

Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) was declared non-compliant for doctoring laboratory data handed over to investigators last year.

It had to provide the information to Wada as a condition of its controversial reinstatement in 2018 after a three-year suspension for a cheating conspiracy across the “vast majority” of Olympic sports.

Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations, and claimed the unprecedented four-year sanction is excessive, unfair and politically motivated.

Its appeal against a punishment that rules it out of both the Tokyo Games and the 2022 football World Cup will be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in November.

Speaking via Zoom from an undisclosed location in the US where he has been in hiding for the past five years, and shrouded in a scarf, sunglasses and hat to keep his changed identity secret, Rodchenkov believes he is now “unrecognisable”, having also changed his behaviour and gestures.