Russian Doping Scandal
Orchestrated to Isolate Russia
Russian Doping Scandal
Orchestrated to Isolate Russia
WADA served as Washington’s
tool in a made-up “scandal” for the sole purpose of serving Washington’s policy
of isolating Russia. The International Olympic Committee refused to buy into
Washington’s plot.
Russian Olympic Doping Scandal: McLaren Report ‘Sexed
up’, implicated Clean Athletes
Global Research, August 06,
2016
More evidence of deep
divisions between the IOC and WADA over the Russian doping scandal have emerged
in two articles in The Australian. One article, which is behind a
paywall, derives from
off-the-record conversations with IOC officials. The other article, which is open access, gives Professor McLaren’s side of the
story. It alludes to the article behind the paywall and reproduces
some of its material.
For an open source account
of what is in the article behind the paywall, one is obliged to turn to RT. It claims that the article says
“….that there are members
within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who believe the release of the
McLaren report on the eve of the Olympics was designed to set off the “nuclear
option” of issuing a blanket ban on Russia competing at the games.”
This is very similar to what
I said in an article I wrote a few days ago. I said that the whole way the
campaign was conducted, and the timing of the publication of the various WADA
reports, shows that the agenda all along was to get the whole of Team Russia
expelled from the Olympic Games. Here is what I said:
“That this was indeed the
agenda is clear enough from the way the whole anti-doping campaign against
Russia has been conducted. It seems that a decision to expel Russia
from the Olympic movement was taken probably around the time of the failure of
the campaign to boycott the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014. All
the various allegations of doping in Russia that have circulated since 2010 and
even before were then sifted through to construct a case. Someone
then put them all together in a dossier, spicing them up with witness testimony
from people like Stepanova and Rodchenkov. A series of lurid
articles and documentaries then appeared in the Western media, reviving all the
allegations and putting the worst possible spin on them. A series of
reports from WADA then followed in quick succession starting in the autumn of
last year, timed to make the maximum possible impact and to leave the least
possible time for proper independent fact checking or for any other steps to be
taken before the start of the Rio Games. That way the allegations
could not be properly and independently assessed and no fully fair arrangements
could be made to allow for the admission of all indisputably clean Russian
athletes. That opened the way, just as the Rio Games were about to
start, for the IOC to be presented with a demand for a blanket ban.”
In my article I also said on
the basis of certain comments by IOC President Thomas Bach that all the facts
pointed to the IOC being furious with WADA for its conduct of the whole affair.
Again RT’s summary of the article behind the paywall confirms as much.
“Once it was clear that the
IOC was not going to support a full ban, the author of the report, the Canadian
lawyer Richard McLaren, handed over the names of Russian athletes who had been
cited in his document to the 28 federations. These names had initially not been
published when the report was first made public on July 18. However, The
paper’s sources reportedly said that WADA now has a problem as it “had been
caught short not having enough detail to justify some of the claims against
athletes.”
“They sexed it up which is
crazy because now the entire report is under scrutiny and I am sure most of the
report is absolutely accurate. It just puts question marks where question marks
should not be,” a sports official told the publication.
The president of the
Australian Olympic Committee, John Coates, who is also an IOC vice president,
reportedly wrote to Australia’s Health Minister Susan Ley, saying that the IOC
had a “lack of confidence in WADA.”
“McLaren said there was
evidence that 170 Russian athletes, the majority of whom were set to compete in
Rio, had previously had positive doping tests destroyed by the Moscow
Anti-Doping Laboratory. Following further analysis of the
samples carried out at the Moscow laboratory, it was found that Russian samples
were split into four separate categories of seriousness. However, one of these
categories was for samples which were not considered serious at all.
“We were asked to make a
judgment about Russian competitors based on McLaren’s report but without having
any of the detail to understand the significance of them being named,” a senior
sports official said, as cited by The Australian. “Now to be told that there
were four different categories – why weren’t we told this at the very
beginning? It’s a mess and it’s WADA’s fault.’’”
That RT is reproducing the
article accurately is confirmed by the open access
article. It corroborates
RT’s account of the article behind the paywall:
“Sports officials have
accused WADA of “sexing up” the case against Russian athletes by handing over
to sporting federations the names of competitors who had no evidence against
them in order to invoke the “nuclear option” of expelling Russia from the
Games. IOC spokesman Mark Adams said yesterday the confusion showed
the dangers of working with an unfinished report: “To have someone who didn’t
(commit) a competition doping offence but was counted as such is a very
dangerous thing. We encourage a full report by Professor McLaren before we
make any full and frank decisions.’’”
(bold italics added)
“In any rational world what
ought to have happened is that when Stepanova’s and Rochenkov’s allegations
became public a full and proper investigation ought to have been set up, with
all the witnesses examined and represented by legal counsel, and with the forensic
evidence examined by a variety of scientific experts, who could have been
cross-examined and whose reports would have been made public. Since
this would have taken time – a year at least – arrangements of the sort now set
up by the IOC should have been made in the meantime to ensure that there was no
cheating by Russian athletes at Rio. Given the scale of the
allegations and the suspicion of state involvement in the doping, this would
inevitably have involved barring Russian athletes already found to have cheated
from competing in Rio, harsh though that is. At the end of this
process the investigation would have delivered a proper report – not like the
deeply flawed report provided by McLaren – either confirming or refuting the
allegations, and making specific recommendations to prevent the problem arising
again.”
The IOC is obviously right
to complain that it should not have been asked to make a decision on the basis
of an incomplete report provided just 2 weeks before the Games in Rio were due
to begin. However, given his actions in preparing his report and the way
he presented it, Professor McLaren is obviously the wrong person to prepare the
full report IOC spokesman Mark Adams is referring to.
The open access article in
The Australian shows the extent to which McLaren and WADA have been thrown onto
the defensive. It reports McLaren complaining that
“The focus has been
completely lost and the discussion is not about the Russian labs and Sochi
Olympic Games, which was under the direction of the IOC. But what is going on
is a hunt for people supposed to be doping but that was never part of my work,
although it is starting to (become) so. My reporting on the state-based system
has turned into a pursuit of individual athletes.’’
I am at a total loss to
understand how Professor McLaren thinks that a report supposedly about an
alleged state-sponsored system of doping should not look into the evidence of
doping on the part of individual athletes, when it is precisely those individual
cases of doping which are the evidence that there was a state-sponsored system
of doping in the first place.
Obviously there was
insufficient time to look into each and every allegation of doping properly in
the 57 days in which Professor McLaren’s investigation was conducted.
However that merely points to the fact that conducting a proper
investigation within a timeframe of just 57 days was impossible.
Professor McLaren should have admitted as much and asked for more time to
conduct his investigation properly, leaving it to WADA and the IOC to put in
place proper arrangements to prevent possible cheating by Russian athletes at
the Olympic Games in Rio in the meantime. However that is not what he did.
Instead he delivered an incomplete and defective report and demanded a
blanket ban on the strength of it.
Frankly I cannot see in
Professor McLaren’s words anything other than confirmation that that was his
objective all along. Judging from what IOC officials are reported to have
told The Australian, it seems that is their opinion too.
Further confirmation that
this was the objective is provided by the way WADA is now desperately trying to
retreat from the way McLaren “implicated” individual athletes in his report.
In order to explain this away WADA’s chief executive Olivier Niggli is
quoted by The Australian as providing what can only be called a twisted
explanation of what happened.
“WADA chief executive
Olivier Niggli said the confusion arose because sports officials had not
understood what the word ‘’implicated’’ meant. ‘’Professor McLaren
gave each sport the list of the athletes who were implicated. That was the word
used by the IOC; which athletes were appearing there in the report. Then we get
to the confusing part. He gave the international federations everything he had,
every name.’’ There was no further information about some names, yet the sports
federations believed listing meant they were ‘’implicated’’ and they should
withdraw the athletes and, following IOC guidelines, they should withdraw them
from Olympics competition.”
That Professor McLaren (who
is a lawyer) “implicated” athletes in a way that was not intended to cast
suspicion on them strikes me as frankly absurd. On the contrary it
is now starting to look as if he presented his findings in such a way as to
create the impression that there was more evidence of Russian athletes being
involved in doping than was actually the case.
All this is of course grist
to the mill for the lawyers in the court cases which the Russian athletes are
now bringing. Some of the comments on the thread to the article in which I discussed these court cases doubted that they would have
much effect. On the contrary it is precisely because these court
cases are being brought that the IOC and WADA are now so publicly at odds with
each other. What one can see in these angry exchanges and recriminations
are the frantic steps of the two sporting bodies as they try desperately to cover
their positions in anticipation of the court cases that are now coming.
Moreover in any court case there is a legal duty of full disclosure which
the Russian athletes can use to demand sight of all the correspondence
(including telephone records and emails) which led to the decision to exclude
them being made. I expect their lawyers to advise them to use this right
to the hilt. This is beginning to look like a debacle. As I have
said before this affair is only at its start.
The original source of this
article is The Duran
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