The Russian doping scandal has apparently grown to much higher proportions than previously assumed.
The Olympic Summer Games in London 2012, the 2013 Athletics World Championship in Moscow, and the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi in 2014 had been affected. There was a “strategy for medal procurement in summer and winter sports”, said the Anti Doping agency (Wada) in London.
The Canadian also spoke of fraud in “unprecedented scope”. “The Russian team has corrupted the games of London in a way that has never been there, and the whole extent of it will probably never be known,” McLaren said.
In the report, Witali Mutko is directly accused. The 57-year-old politician has been responsible for sports in Russia since 2008 and was appointed Vice-Prime Minister by President Vladimir Putin in October. Putin itself is not mentioned in the report.
McLaren also pulled concrete figures on doping revelations in Sochi. There is evidence that doping samples from a total of twelve medalists had been manipulated. In four cases they were winners of gold medals. Names were not mentioned. This also affects fifteen Russian medalists in the Games in London and four participants in the World Athletics Championships in Moscow.
As evidence, McLaren published 1166 documents, including photos, forensic reports and e-mails. According to McLaren, these are “undoubted facts”. Nevertheless, he limited the scope of the report: “Although the image is now clearer, it is not yet complete. We only had access to a small part of the data.”
Prior to the presentation of the second part of the report, IOC President Thomas Bach had cautioned: “No premature conclusions should be drawn”. As a matter of fact, Bach pointed out that punishing the responsible persons of a doping system – whether athletes, coaches or officials – is the goal. “I would never want to see such a person again at the Olympics,” Bach said, repeating his demand to punish serious fraud in sport with a life-long Olympic spell. Now he will have to be measured by his words.
In the first published report on 18 July McLaren had previously demonstrated that there was a tangled web of Russian secret service members involved in covering up cases of doping at the Games in Sochi. At that time, the Canadians had only 57 days to investigate – this time they had much longer. He had reported that about 650 positive doping tests by Russian athletes had disappeared between 2012 and 2015 in about 30 sports. McLaren’s investigations were launched in May by unveiling the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, Grigori Rodchenko.