Russia, facing deepening scrutiny over accusations that it orchestrated a doping campaign during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, on Sunday made a public plea for its track and field athletes to be allowed to compete in this summer’s Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Writing in British newspaper the Sunday Times, Russian Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko said Russian officials, coaches and athletes made “serious mistakes,” but he stopped short of specifying them or admitting to any state role.
“We are very sorry that athletes who tried to deceive us, and the world, were not caught sooner,” Mutko wrote.
Photo: AP
“We are very sorry, because Russia is committed to upholding the highest standards in sport and is opposed to anything that threatens the Olympic values,” he added.
However, he added: “It cannot be right that clean athletes should suffer for the behavior of others. In no other walk of life would this happen.”
The accusations of an elaborate drug operation at the 2014 Winter Olympics, published last week in the New York Times, have led to growing calls to bar Russia and its powerhouse track and field team from the Rio Games, which are set to open in August.
World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Craig Reedie told the BBC on Saturday that it was “highly unlikely” that Russia’s anti-doping agency would be declared compliant with world sports rules in time for the Games.
Russia was provisionally suspended from international track and field competition by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in November last year after WADA issued a 323-page report outlining a pervasive culture of doping among the country’s sports programs.
The IAAF is expected to decide next month whether the country has done enough to fix the problems and have its eligibility reinstated.
In the New York Times report, Grigory Rodchenkov, a former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, detailed how a doping program that involved dozens of athletes unfolded at the Sochi Games.
Rodchenkov said state anti-doping experts and members of the intelligence service covertly replaced tainted urine samples with clean ones collected from the athletes months earlier, before they started doping.
Russia has reacted to the accusations with statements both deploring the use of performing-enhancing drugs by its athletes and vigorously rejecting contentions that it was involved.
On Thursday last week, the Russian Ministry of Sport acknowledged in a statement that doping problems existed among its athletes while expressing “shock” over Rodchenkov’s disclosures.
Speaking to reporters the next day, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “All this simply looks like slander by a turncoat.”
Russian Deputy Minister of Sport Yuri Nagornykh said Russia and the athletes named in the New York Times article were considering whether to file a defamation lawsuit.
On Sunday, Mutko struck a much more conciliatory tone.
He said Russian officials were doing all they could to stamp out doping by the country’s athletes, adding that aspiring Olympians would be subjected to additional tests and that two “international experts” were now based in Moscow to supervise the country’s anti-doping agency.
“We have done everything that has been asked of us by the IAAF in order to be reinstated,” Mutko wrote in the Sunday Times.
However, the scourge of doping extends worldwide and to single out Russia would be unfair, he added.
“The Olympic Games should be a cause of unity,” he said. “Barring Russia’s athletes from competing in Rio would risk tearing this unity apart.”
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