Russia agrees to IOC demand over retesting for 2012 and 2014 Olympics
Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, said the country will accept an International Olympic Committee plan to retest all drug test samples given by its athletes at the 2012 and 2014 Olympics.
“The IOC has now decided to retest all the samples; let them retest,” Mutko, who was sports minister at the time of the 2012 and 2014 Olympics, told the Russian state news agency R-Sport. He added that Russia will keep a careful eye on the process.
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The IOC’s declaration on Friday followed the second and final part of an independent commission report by the World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Prof Richard McLaren. It said that more than 1,000 Russian athletes, including medal winners at the Summer Games in London and the Winter Olympics in Sochi, had benefited from a state‑backed campaign of doping and drugs test cover-ups.
Mutko, whose brief as deputy prime minister covers sports policy, also suggested that he does not expect Russia to be barred from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. He said the IOC set a precedent when it decided against a blanket ban for Russia from this summer’s Olympics in Rio .
“I think that the IOC has chosen its direction, that there should be no collective responsibility in this situation,” he said. If a specific athlete is found to have committed an offense, “then let’s punish him,” Mutko added, rather than excluding the whole Russian team.
Mutko repeated the Russian government’s claim that it has never given state support to doping and that there was no widespread doping of the Russian team at the Sochi Olympics.
Mutko did not address allegations in McLaren’s report that he directed so-called washout testing – unofficial internal tests before major competitions to ensure banned substances would not be detectable when doped athletes later gave samples at the event.
The 144-page McLaren report “sharpens the picture and confirms the findings” of his interim report published in July, three weeks before the start of the Rio Olympics.
As well as the report, Wada has provided a searchable database of emails, forensic reports, laboratory tests and spreadsheets totalling more than 1,100 items.
Even this, McLaren said, is “not the complete picture” as his team was denied access to the Moscow anti‑doping laboratory’s computer server and the hundreds of athletes’ samples still in its freezers.
Meanwhile, the Chinese swimmer Chen Xinyi has been banned for two years by Fina, the sport’s governing body, for failing a drugs test at the Rio Games. The 18-year-old, who finished fourth in the women’s 100m butterfly, tested positive for banned substance hydrochlorothiazide – an illicit masking agent – and accepted a provisional ban at the time.
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