Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: A far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, but also the entire Olympic movement.
Over several days of interviews with the New York Times, Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.
“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Russian Anti-Doping Agency acting director-general Anna Antseliovich said of years’ worth of cheating schemes, while emphasizing that the government’s top officials were not involved.
Russian sports officials had denied the doping operation’s existence, despite a detailed confession by the nation’s former anti-doping lab chief, Grigory Rodchenkov, in a New York Times report in May last year that was subsequently confirmed by global anti-doping regulators.
An investigator appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, Richard McLaren, published more extensive evidence this month that prompted the International Olympic Committee to open disciplinary proceedings against dozens of additional Russian athletes.
Russia’s drastic shift in tone might be motivated by a desire to reconcile with the regulators, who have stipulated that the nation accept the findings of the recent investigation before the country is recertified to conduct drug testing and be a host again of Olympic competitions.
However, the officials continue to reject the accusation that the doping program was state-sponsored. They defined the Russian state as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest associates.
Vitaly Smirnov, 81, a top sports official whose career dates to the Soviet era and who was appointed this year by Putin to reform the nation’s anti-doping system, said he did not want “to speak for the people responsible.”
Smirnov said that he had not met most of the individuals implicated in the report by McLaren — emphasizing that they had been dismissed as a result — nor did he know where they were.
However, even as he and other officials signaled their acceptance of the fundamental findings of McLaren’s investigation, they were largely not conciliatory, suggesting that cheating to benefit Russia had served to offset what they perceived as preferential treatment for Western nations by global sports authorities.
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