The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on Monday called for Russia to be banned from next summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro after a commissioned investigation uncovered rampant doping among athletes and a cover-up of the abuses by national authorities.
“It’s worse than we thought,” Commission Chairman Richard Pound said Monday. “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”
The commission also called for lifetime suspensions of five Russian athletes, a suspension of the Russian athletics federation until it can prove its athletes are cooperative and a requirement that the Russian testing lab send its samples to other labs for further review.
The newly released 350-page report uncovered doping among track and field athletes during the Sochi Olympics in 2014, according to the group’s findings.
It alleged there were also individuals pretending to be engineers at the Sochi drug-testing lab who were actually from the federal security service, FSB. According to the report, 1,147 doping control samples were ordered destroyed days before a WADA audit by the Moscow Testing Laboratory Director Grigory Rodchenkov.
Pound claimed Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko had to have known of the cover-up. “It was not possible for him to be unaware of it,” he said.
But Mutko told Russia’s Interfax agency it has “the same [doping] percentage as other countries,” and a spotlight was unreasonably put on the country.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, did not offer additional comment.
The International Association of Athletics Federation says it is considering imposing sanctions against Russia, including the suspension of track and field athletes from all international competitions, including the Olympics.
