Russia rejects sports doping allegations as ‘groundless’
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Version 0 of 1. MOSCOW — Russian officials sharply rejected allegations of a vast “state-sponsored” sports doping program Tuesday, dismissing the claims by world sporting overseers as “groundless” and not backed up by any clear evidence. The response points to intensifying battles between the Kremlin and global sports officials after a powerful anti-doping agency charged that Russia has relied on a drug program seeking to give its athletes the upper hand in international competitions, including the Olympics. According to the accusations, detailed in a damning 323-page report released Monday by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Russian officials including Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko directed labs to hide telltale signs of performance-enhancing drugs. [Read the full WADA report] “They are groundless,” Dmitry Peskov, the personal spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told journalists. “The point is that if some accusations are voiced, they should be substantiated by some evidence,” he said. “No evidence has been announced so far; it is difficult to accept any accusations.” The case is just one in a series of ethics investigations into international sports that have touched Russia, where Putin has sought to revive a Soviet-era culture of sporting achievement crowned by holding the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. While Putin has not publicly commented on the doping scandal, he suggested adopting a U.N. resolution last month that would promote the “depoliticization of sport.” When top officials of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, were arrested in Geneva in May in connection with Swiss and U.S. investigations into corruption and vote-buying, Russian officials accused the United States of overstepping its jurisdiction. Some also suggested that Washington wanted to pressure the organization to rescind its selection of Russia as the host country for the 2018 World Cup. On Tuesday, faced with a new scandal, some officials suggested the report was part of a larger political conflict between Russia and the West that has been punctuated by the conflict in Ukraine and the war in Syria in the last year. "There is an element of a political hit job here because quite a few things were described in a biased way," Vadim Zelichenok, acting head of the Russian Athletics Foundation, said at a news conference in Moscow. Russian officials have generally dismissed the report, but the country’s response is not yet clear. After the report was released Monday, the Kremlin announced that Putin would meet this week with the heads of Russia’s national sports federations in Sochi, likely to discuss the doping scandal. On Tuesday, Zelichenok also announced that a Russian testing lab targeted in the report would be temporarily shut. The Russian Sports Ministry said in a statement Monday evening that it would study the report, but Mutko, the sports minister, questioned WADA’s evidence in television interviews and said the organization could not bar Russian athletes from competitions. The WADA report cited some athletes by name, but it also used anonymous sources of information. Peskov, like other Russian officials, stopped short of denying the claims made in the document, instead saying the evidence presented was insufficient to prove Russian wrongdoing. The report could have serious consequences for Russia. In the report, the World Anti-Doping Agency called into question some results from the 2012 London Olympics and recommended that Russia’s track and field team be suspended from competition immediately. Asked about the possibility of a ban from next year’s Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Peskov said: “Ask the Sports Ministry about all that.” [American runner: I was racing Russian “robots”] Monday’s report suggested that Russia’s alleged doping program may be more widespread. “There is no reason to believe that [track and field] is the only sport in Russia to have been affected,” it said. “It may be the residue of the old Soviet Union system,” Richard W. Pound, lead author of the report and former WADA president, said at a news conference in Geneva. The widespread corruption, Pound added, “was worse than we thought.” The Russian Sports Ministry, led by Mutko, directly instructed lab personnel to manipulate samples, WADA charged. Pound said Mutko “knew what was going on.” Although the report stopped short of recommending an outright ban of Russia’s track and field team from the 2016 Rio Games — a threat Pound equated to a “nuclear weapon” — it called for an immediate suspension of the team, with the understanding that the suspension could be lifted in time for the Olympics if Russia complied. “For 2016, our recommendation is that the Russian Federation be suspended,” Pound said in Geneva. “If they don’t [comply], then it has to play itself out. The outcome may be that there are no track and field athletes at Rio.” [Olympic runner calls track and field ‘a complete joke’ in report’s wake] Russia won a total of 81 medals at the London Games — third most among all countries — including 18 in track and field. A year later, it led all nations with seven gold medals at the 2013 World Track and Field Championships — the same year in which WADA reported that Russian athletes accounted for 225 doping violations, the most in the world, including 42 violations in track and field. The report recommended lifetime bans for five Russian coaches and five athletes — including Mariya Savinova and Ekaterina Poistogova, the gold and bronze medalists, respectively, from the women’s 800 meters at the London Games. The International Association for Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body for world track and field, could strip the implicated Russian athletes of their medals in the coming months. Dave Sheinin and Will Hobson in Washington contributed to this report. |