From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
Olga Zaitseva, Ekaterina Glazyrina, Olga Vilukhina, and Irina Starykh celebrate their IBU World Cup biathlon relay victory in Ruhpolding, Germany in January 2014. (Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus)
The Biathlon Integrity Unit (BIU) announced on Thursday that Russian biathletes Ekaterina Glazyrina and Timofey Lapshin were provisionally suspended. According to the BIU, Lapshin has been competing for Korea since 2017.
Both Lapshin and Glazyrina are accused of violating anti-doping rules (ADRV). The evidence used to hand down the provisional suspensions came from information included in the McLaren Report and data from the Moscow Lab’s data (LIMS) handed over to WADA in 2019.
The BIU states this is Lapshin’s first violation. The IBU website indicates Lapshin has earned six career IBU World Cup podiums: two wins, a single second place, and three third-place efforts.
Glazyrina served a two-year ban from competition beginning in February 2018. She was allowed to compete again in 2020. This competition ban resulted from using a banned substance.
Glazyrina has five IBU World Cup podiums: two second-place finishes, and three thirds.
Under the International Biathlon Union Integrity Code, both athletes have an opportunity to respond to the BIU’s sanction.
On November 30, The International Biathlon Union (IBU) announced in a press release that it had began proceedings against four Russian biathletes accused of violating anit-doping rules.
Evgeny Ustyugov, Svetlana Sleptsova, Alexander Pechenkin and Alexander Chernysev were the athletes named. Pechenkin is the only active athlete among the four, and he was provisionally suspended from competition while the case advances.
The samples providing cause for the cases against the four athletes were collected between 2012 and 2015. According to the press release, information gathered from the Moscow Laboratory’s Information Management System (LIMS) along with allegations made in the McLaren Report helped lead to the anti-doping rule violations charges.
The nest step in the proceedings involves hearings conducted by the IBU. The press release claims investigations into additional anti-doping rules violations against other Russian biathletes are ongoing.
These recent IBU cases against Russian athletes comes at a time when the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) continues to gain unfettered access to RUSADA’s Moscow Lab, its LIMS data, and any underlying data. These conditions are to be met by December 31, as part of RUSADA’s conditional reinstatement as a compliant anti-doping agency. Last week, WADA announced it had sent three representatives to Moscow to discuss fulfilling those conditions.
After the announcement that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Executive Committee, which WADA refers to in short at the ExCo, voted 9-2 in favor of reinstating the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) on Thursday, it released a statementdescribing what it considers a conditional reinstatement.
As mentioned in an previous FasterSkier article, Russia has not fulfilled two outstanding provisions laid out in WADA’s “roadmap” for reinstatement.
In its most recent public statement on the matter, also published on Thursday, Sept. 20, WADA detailed those remaining conditions:
“That the responsible authorities for anti-doping in Russia must publically accept the reported outcomes of the McLaren Investigation; and
That the Russian Government must provide access for appropriate entities to the stored samples and electronic data in the former Moscow Laboratory, which are sealed off due to a Federal investigation.”
In its attempt to move forward, WADA claimed the Sept. 20 reinstatement remains subject to what it calls two “post-reinstatement conditions”. (Absent from the latest statement is the demand that Russia admit its involvement in state-sponsored doping, as detailed in the McLaren Report.)
The Russians must release the former Moscow lab’s Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) and related “underlying” data by Dec. 31, 2018. LIMS is a WADA-standardized method of cataloging and storing tests and corresponding analytical results. The data will serve as a means to pinpoint which athletes were in violation of the WADA code and need to be adjudicated.
According to a previous statement, WADA believes it is already in possession of the Moscow Lab’s LIMS data. Last November, WADA reported that it had received LIMS data from a whistleblower including all the testing data from January 2012 through August 2015.
Once the data is turned over and reviewed, WADA has the right to reanalyze any samples no later than June 30, 2019. The agreement also states RUSADA must be successfully audited within the next four months.
If the outlined conditions are not met, WADA asserts its Compliance Review Committee (CRC) will convene and advise the WADA ExCo on any potential RUSADA non-compliance.
A scene from the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
A full Olympic quad after Sochi, nothing remains irrefutably clean. Off the radar then on again, the Sochi doping scandal has sent recent tremors through the sports world.
In a quick summary, after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the host nation was handed sanctions for the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics that affected some of its athletes. A total ban from Rio was not enacted despite the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommending the contrary. Russian athletes competed under the Russian flag.
At the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) handed down a fiercer sanction. Russia as an official team and its Olympic delegation were banned from the Games, as were athletes suspected of taking part in the Sochi affair.
Russian winter athletes without any ties to the scandal competed under the IOC’s neutral flag as the Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR).
Russian President Vladimir Putin with Russia’s 2018 Olympians prior to the Games on Jan. 31, 2018. (Photo: Wikipedia)
At the 2018 Games, OAR cross-country athletes were on-form. They were repeated medalists, fast and collectively young.
Today (Thursday, Sept. 20), it was the WADA’s turn to take another stance. During a meeting in Seychelles, the WADA Executive Committee (EC) voted to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA).
WADA announced the decision via Twitter. In the two-part tweet, WADA President Sir Craig Reedie stated, “Today, the great majority of WADA’s ExCo decided to reinstate RUSADA as compliant with the Code subject to strict conditions, upon recommendation by the Agency’s independent CRC and in accordance with an agreed process.
“This decision provides a clear timeline by which WADA must be given access to the former Moscow laboratory data and samples with a clear commitment by the ExCo that should this timeline not be met, it would support the CRC’s recommendation to reinstate non-compliance.”
For reasons already exhaustively documented, RUSADA was deemed non-compliant in November 2015. By August 2017, WADA had created a concrete outline of concessions and reforms known as the RUSADA: Roadmap to Compliance.
The roadmap reads like a hardened list of demands. In Part I of the document, WADA notes 20 actions already taken by RUSADA as conditions for reinstatement as a compliant anti-doping agency. Part II details 12 steps that remained unfulfilled at the time of the roadmap’s release. Much of those 12 steps begin with the words “RUSADA must”. Last week, it became public that much of WADA’s leadership have a malleable understanding of the word “must”.
Here’s the basic background to understanding how WADA’s Sept. 20 EC vote transpired:
Two critical conditions set forth in the RUSADA roadmap remained unmet by Russia as of Sept. 20, 2018. Russia has not officially accepted the McLaren Report findings and has not provided WADA with unmanipulated digital forensic data or unfettered access to RUSADA’s Moscow lab.
Starting this summer, it was time for WADA and RUSADA to think about a resolution.
In a letter obtained by the BBC dated June 22, 2018, signed by Reedie and WADA Director General Olivier Niggli, the two responded to a recent overture from Russian Minister of Sport Pavel Kolobkov. The letter clarified how WADA would be willing to move forward in negotiating Russia’s reinstatement.
Kolobkov’s response did not mention the McLaren Report commissioned by WADA, but it did acknowledge the IOC’s 2017 Schmid Report (the IOC investigation into the McLaren Report’s findings). But no overt guilt was admitted in the letter. Instead, it made a tepid hint at conciliation. According to the letter, the Russian Federation “fully accepted the decision of the IOC Executive Board on December 5, 2017, that was made based on the findings of the Schmid Report.”
The main body of Kolobkov’s letter establishes a quid pro quo. It states that only after RUSADA is reinstated, and with the consent of the Russia Investigative Committee, Russia will provide access to its lab and data. Kolobkov provides no timeline for when Russia would provide these two key provisions after reinstatement.
Beckie Scott with the gold medal she was awarded at a ceremony in Vancouver in June 2004. A former Canadian cross-country skier, Scott finished third in the 5 k pursuit at the 2002 Olympics but was later awarded gold when the two women ahead of her were disqualified for using performance-enhancing drugs. (Photo: Cross Country Canada)
On Sept. 14, only a day after Kolobkov’s letter, WADA’s Compliance Review Committee (CRC) approved RUSADA’s reinstatement. A member of the CRC, Beckie Scott, a former Canadian cross-country skier and Olympic gold medalist, resigned her position last week in protest of the pending reinstatement. Scott remains the Chair of WADA’s Athlete Commission.
In an interview with the CBC on Thursday following the official decision, Scott said she was “profoundly disappointed”.
“I feel that this was an opportunity for WADA as the global body responsible for regulating doping in sport and responsible for the rights of clean athletes has really dealt a devastating blow to clean athletes with this decision and I’m quite dismayed with the way things went today,” she continued.
“With WADA’s sudden shift in position raising questions about its transparency and about where its loyalties lie, we must begin the journey of returning trust to the system, enhancing WADA and creating a system fit for the next generations of athletes,” Moses wrote. “Having spoken to athletes, I know they overwhelmingly support the right decision being made in the Seychelles — they overwhelmingly support WADA’s sticking to its road map. This was not the time, they say, for the global antidoping body to perform the U-turn of all U-turns.”
The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) issued a press release echoing sentiments to instill faith in the anti-doping system.
“We hope that WADA can reach a conclusion on RUSADA that will give athletes a firm belief that when they compete, it will be on a level playing field, without any doubts,” it stated. “Anything that stops short of satisfying that will not only be a huge disappointment to the USOC and American athletes, but to the entire Olympic and Paralympic movements.”
But according to Reedie, Russia’s reinstatement is key to progress WADA’s worldwide mission.
“It’s my convinced view that the best thing WADA can do is to have an efficient and well-operated anti-doping system in Russia, and we’ve been trying to do that for two years,” he told the BBC. “This moves things forward.”
“To sit back and do nothing doesn’t serve the world of sport so I think progress has been made,” Reedie added. “To the members of the Ukad, athletes’ commission, I am grateful to them for their advice and can be reassured that I take their advice and I operate within the roadmap.”
One WADA EC member, Linda Helleland, Norway’s sport minister and vice president of WADA as she represents national governments on the EC, declared herself a “no” vote prior to today’s meeting.
FasterSkier will update this story with any new developments.
Avid readers of FasterSkier know her as the voice of reason and evidence when it comes to reporting on all things doping in nordic sport. Chelsea Little, a force here at FasterSkier for eight years, is stepping down from her editor-at-large position. Based in Switzerland as she wraps up her Ph.D. in aquatic biology, Little took some time last week to talk about her tenure at FasterSkier and what her plans are for the future.
Chelsea Little and Jessie Diggins in the Davos media mixed zone in 2016.
Little’s coverage also included non-doping related pieces and race reports from both cross-country and biathlon. Asked about some of the work she is most proud of, Little referenced a story on the connection between birth control pills and athletic performance. Here’s a link to that piece.
Chelsea Little interviewing Susan Dunklee after her silver medal at the 2017 IBU World Championships. (Photo Max Cobb)
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Bessmertnykh, Maxim Vyegzhanin, and Alexander Legkov were disqualified for doping, but had their bans overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The gold medalist was initially banned and ordered to turn over his medal. That happened after investigations by journalists and anti-doping administrators found that he had likely benefitted from a sample-swapping scheme instituted by the Russian government. The crowning achievement of the scheme came at the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where athletes’ “dirty” urine was swapped for “clean” samples so that their illicit doping would not be detected by tests.
On Monday, CAS released the details behind its decision in Legkov’s case.
In short, they did not find enough evidence that Legkov had personally been involved in the scheme, which they acknowledged existed. But testimony by whistleblowers and forensic evidence was not deemed to be enough to justify disqualifying him.
Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping laboratory, wrote in testimony to the Panel in January that Legkov had been involved in the doping scheme and had been instructed to provide clean urine samples so that they could be swapped out to hide dirty ones. Legkov had also participated in “washout testing,” he said, to determine how long drugs would stay in his body. He related conversations with higher-ups who told him that Legkov was a “special project”, and had notes in his diary from the 2014 Olympics which described swapping out Legkov’s urine sample after he won the 50 k.
The CAS panel didn’t agree with any of those assertions. The fact that Rodchenkov stated that Legkov was providing clean urine had little value, they wrote, because nobody testified to having seen him do it.
“The Panel notes that the IOC does not specify the particular date when, or location where, the Athlete is alleged to have provided clean urine for this purpose,” it writes. “Further, no physical evidence has been presented showing the specific vessel in which the clean urine from the Athlete is alleged to have been collected and stored. Nor has the Panel seen any communications sent by or to the Athlete that refer to the collection, transmission, storage or use of clean urine for the purpose of urine substitution.”
Regarding Legkov’s presence on the “Duchess list” of athletes receiving a special drug cocktail, and and Rodchenkov’s conversation with a boss who told him to make sure Legkov was protected, the panel wrote, “this evidence is hearsay and as such its probative value is very limited, particularly insofar as it relates to the Athlete’s subsequent actions during the Sochi Games in February 2014. In any event, even if it is accepted at face value, the alleged statement merely reflects an intention on Ms. Rodionova’s part. It does not provide any evidence regarding the actions or state of mind of the Athlete.”
Rodchenkov’s testimony was not the only aspect of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) case against Legkov. In addition, multiple marks were found on Legkov’s sample bottles, consistent with having been opened.
CAS did not buy this as evidence of an anti-doping rule violation either, however.
“The Panel considers that the fact that sample bottles were opened would, if established, provide considerable, albeit not conclusive, inferential evidence that urine was substituted and, as a further step of conclusion, the substituted urine contained prohibited substances,” they wrote.
After that, they tore apart the testimony of the expert who identified the marks on the bottle, writing that while he had established that such marks did not occur as part of “normal use”, they could have occurred when the bottles were being transported from one place to another.
Another criticism? That while the IOC’s chosen expert established “normal use” using empty bottles, the presence of urine in a bottle could change things. Maybe these marks might not actually be indicative of the bottles being opened. They wrote, “the Panel considers that there is some merit in the Athlete’s criticism that the failure to conduct tests on sample bottles that were filled with liquid reduces the probative value of the results of those tests.”
In total, they found that the existence of state-sponsored doping could not be used to punish Legkov without other strong evidence that he had benefitted – and didn’t deem any of the evidence presented to be strong enough.
“In reaching these conclusions, the Panel wishes to underscore what it has not decided in this appeal,” the panel wrote. “The Panel has not made a ruling on whether and to what extent the alleged doping scheme during the Sochi Games existed and how it operated even though it recognizes that there is significant evidence that it was in place and worked.”
Russia’s Alexander Legkov (3) after winning Olympic gold in the men’s 50 k freestyle mass start at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Russia’s anti-doping director at the time, Grigory Rodchenkov stated that he switched out Legkov’s anti-doping sample for a vial of clean urine collected previously. The International Olympic Committee stripped Legkov of his gold medal and banned him from future Olympics, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned those sanctions in February 2018.
Editor’s Note: The following thoroughly cited opinion piece, prompted by the 2017 ‘Icarus’ documentary, was written by Maks Zechel, a 20-year-old Canadian cross-country skier who spent the 2017/2018 race season training abroad with Team Asker in Norway. Zechel is a regular contributor at FasterSkier, with his ongoing series: “Closing the Gap”.
***
February 23, 2014
Sochi: a home Olympics and the opportunity of a lifetime. Russia, despite being one of the strongest skiing nations in the world, has no individual medals in cross-country skiing leading into the final race of the championships. As the athletes shuffle nervously in the tracks before the 50 k mass start, the pressure on the Russian men can be felt even by me, watching on TV from home.
Putin is in the stands. It’s just a ski race, but how much more than that is at stake?
“The Moscow Laboratory operated, for the protection of doped Russian athletes, within a State-dictated failsafe system” (McLaren 1)
A sunny day, a roaring home crowd. Alexander Legkov is in a world of his own as he absolutely destroys himself over the final climb, skiing with the passion that it takes in all sports to win an Olympic medal. Russian flags waving everywhere, the crowd is absolutely deafening as Legkov adds his first Olympic gold to his already legendary career. Maxim Vylegzhanin and Ilia Chernousov lunge across the line behind him, with Chernousov having given every last bit of himself to outsprint Norway’s Martin Johnsrud Sundby to complete the Russian podium sweep on home soil. A dream come true.
“The Sochi Laboratory operated a unique sample swapping methodology to enable doped Russian athletes to compete at the Games” (McLaren 1)
When you ski with your teammates in front of your friends and family at home, you ski with a fire that is otherwise difficult to find. The presence of those who know you makes you feel guilty if you do not perform to your very best, you are pushed to keep up to those that your mind refuses to admit defeat against, and your own potential reaches new heights when your teammates accomplish something great. There is no cover of anonymity with which to hide the secrets behind your performance, because these people know what it took, and did not take, to get you to where you are.
“A pre-selected group of Russian athletes competing at Sochi were protected by the Sochi sample swapping methodology” (McLaren 67)
Despite the whispers of corruption surrounding Russia’s Olympic team, I cheered for those three skiers, who did the nigh-impossible and pushed their bodies as hard as anyone else to make their country proud. I do not know what exactly went into achieving that medal, but I do know that the incredible display of effort and the tears of happiness falling from Legkov’s face as he was raised onto his teammate’s shoulders, were very real.
“After he became laboratory director, and in furtherance of his responsibility to improve Russian sport performance by covering up doping, Dr. Rodchenkov developed a steroid cocktail optimized to avoid detection” (McLaren 49)
I first dreamt of going to the Olympics when I was 11 years old. This dream sparked an inner drive of mine that has lasted almost a decade, and I like to think that it will never extinguish. Sometimes, I wonder what lights that same flame in children around the world. In most countries, I like to think that many experience moments like mine: a motivation flourished from watching the passion of the Olympics, being inspired by older siblings, or being born with the need to be the first kid through the school doors when the bell rings for recess.
“The steroids were dissolved in alcohol … The solution was then swished in the mouth in order to be absorbed by the bucal membrane and then spit out … the detection window for the steroids in the cocktail would not exceed 3-5 days” (McLaren 49-50)
In parts of the world where fewer children are fortunate enough to make the decision to pursue a sport just because they are inspired, I wonder what brings them to those future championships. Is their talent used out of joy or out of the need to provide for those without the same athletic abilities? Was their talent exploited at a young age as a way for a country to show its dominance? Were they given a choice: to follow their dreams and do what they love by the prescribed method, or to not follow their heart at all?
I think about the lengths that I would go to support my family if they depended on me, and suddenly the way that I pursue sport seems insignificant, a trivial lifestyle “earned” through right of birth. Being born to these opportunities makes it all the more important to not waste them. My great-grandfather used to say, “if you’re going to do something, then you may as well do it right”, and those are words that I attempt to live by. To me, that means clean sport.
But clean sport is now more at risk than it has been in decades. Once an already colossal task of catching individual dirty athletes, we are now facing an extensive doping regime, backed by an entire government.
“[B]y the time of the Olympic Games in London, many of Russia’s top athletes were using the cocktail” (McLaren 51)
When faced with the enormity of the Russian state-sponsored doping system, it is no longer adequate to simply prosecute individual athletes. A large part of the problem when it comes to justly dealing with the system that made it possible for Russian athletes to cheat, is that WADA and the IOC are pitted against the entirety of the Russian government. It is not the USA and Canada versus Russia, or any other country versus Russia; it is two sporting entities, independent of any particular country, against the full power of the Russian government.
“The Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athlete’s analytical results or sample swapping, with the active participation and assistance of the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service], CSP [Center of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia], and both Moscow and Sochi Laboratories” (McLaren 1)
“… Deputy Minister of Sport, Yuri Nagornykh, was appointed in 2010 by Executive Order of then Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin” (McLaren 10)
The state-run doping program organized for the Sochi Olympics was not just about sport, it was politically motivated, overseen by President Putin himself. This sets Russia apart from previous doping scandals, such as that of the Finnish cross-country ski team in 2001, where doping operations were concentrated to a select number of skiers and their coaches. When the truth was uncovered about their national heroes, Finland, in complete shock, took steps to recover from the international disgrace that its ski team had brought upon them (Andrews). Iivo Niskanen and Krista Pärmäkoski have proven that it is possible for a great skiing nation to recover from such a disaster and win clean, paving the way for the next generation of Finnish skiers.
“ … this Article would prohibit altering identification numbers on a Doping Control form during Testing, breaking the B bottle at the time of B Sample analysis, or altering a Sample by the addition of a foreign substance” (“World Anti-Doping Code” 21)
The situation we see today is different. After the exposure of irrefutable evidence confirming state-sponsored doping and the covering up of doping evidence in Russia, it came as a disappointment to many when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) annulled the sanctions imposed by the IOC on 28 Russian athletes.
The evidence of coverups and doping are clear, but the CAS ruling was that “the evidence collected was found to be insufficient to establish that an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) was committed by the athletes concerned” (“Media Release”). The evidence may be adequate to find Russia guilty of state-sponsored doping, but it is not enough to build a case against each individual athlete. This is likely because of the destruction and tampering of drug tests and results by Russian “anti”-doping personnel and Article 10.5.1.2 of the World Anti-Doping Code, which states that, if the “detected Prohibited Substance came from a Contaminated Product, then the period of Ineligibility shall be, at a minimum, a reprimand and no period of Ineligibility, and at a maximum, two years Ineligibility” (“World Anti-Doping Code” 64).
But if the evidence is inadequate, then why are some Russian athletes still facing penalties? Alexander Legkov and Sergey Ustiugov were both unable to compete at the PyeongChang Olympics, but Ustiugov can still race on the World Cup, while Legkov cannot. Evidence against athletes like Legkov proves that they were in some way a part of the state-sponsored doping program, but it is difficult to legitimately sentence them when evidence proving exactly what they have done has been tampered with or destroyed. Athletes like Ustiugov have not been proven to be a part of Russian doping operations, but have violated Article 2.1 of the World Anti-Doping Code through their association with people who are a part of it. This article states that “Athletes and other Persons must not work with coaches, trainers, physicians or other Athlete Support Personnel who are Ineligible on account of an antidoping rule violation … Prohibited association need not involve any form of compensation. (“World Anti-Doping Code” 24).
Sport in Russia will never be fair until Russia takes responsibility for their crimes against clean sport. Whereas Finland bore the weight of what their athletes had done in 2001, and ensured that it would never happen again, the Russian government has more at stake than a few drugged athletes. When doping is politically motivated and backed by the state, I do not think it is possible to solve the issue through sanctions by sporting bodies such as WADA and the IOC alone. Until the Russian government is pushed by other nations to take an interest in ensuring that sports in Russia are clean, the problem can never be completely resolved.
Until substantial action is taken, we will continue to be caught up in a stalemate of “partial blanket bans” and other half-measures. When imposed on a level of command that is too low in the Russian doping system, these actions cannot bring about the outright eradication of doping that we seek. Are sports a high enough priority for entire countries to impose sanctions on the Russian government until they answer for their crimes against clean sport? Or will doping be protected by other political motivations that keep Russia inseparable from the rest of the world? The scope of the Russian government’s involvement in doping is far beyond the reach of traditional sporting sanctions.
“Clean sport is dead” — Jim Walden, lawyer of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov (Panja and Pérez-Peña).
The sporting world no longer holds its breath in anticipation of change. An uncertain future exists for clean sport, but even more disconcerting is the stagnation in which we now settle. With the anti-doping world left spinning its tires in frustration, where does that leave athletes for whom a future of fair play is too late?
Icarus, 2017 documentary film, debuted Aug. 4, 2017 on Netflix (Photo: Wikipedia)
In his dramatic documentary, Icarus, director Bryan Fogel convinced many sports fans that clean athletics, despite the improvement of anti-doping efforts over the years, is a hopeless pursuit. Fogel’s documentary was key to bringing the extent of systematic doping in Russia into the public eye.
In Icarus, Fogel takes anti-doping research to a personal level: after years of training as a high-level (amateur) cyclist, he spends a full year preparing for the “Haute Route” amateur cycling event, while following a doping program. This was prescribed to him by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov (the former director of Russia’s Anti-Doping Center, turned whistleblower, who is now under the witness protection program in the U.S.).
Fogel routinely took a cocktail of PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs), under the careful guidance of Dr. Rodchenkov, and saw massive improvements in his power output ratings on the bike in less than a year. Having placed 14th in the seven-day Haute Route event the previous year, while racing clean, it seemed clear that Fogel would be a strong contender for the win.
He ended up finishing the unbelievably hard event in a far worse position than when he raced clean. From an athlete’s perspective, this does not surprise me. I understand that there are countless elements involved in producing an incredible athletic performance at a set time and place. Fogel’s reaction was different; visibly depressed, he talked of how sobering it was to realize that, no matter what he did, he could never be as great as his cycling heroes. This is a delusional conclusion, one that is biased by his dreams (influenced by growing up with Lance Armstrong as a hero) of becoming a better cyclist.
In these turbulent times for clean sport, it is important for athletes to remember that there are many aspects to training and competing, aside from other athletes cheating, that they can control. Living in Norway has taught me that there is a lot more to skiing fast than just being fit, and that applies to all sports.
Drugs don’t magically make you a fast skier, just like a high VO2 max score doesn’t make you a competitive World Cup skier. There are many elements to cross-country skiing that have a far bigger effect on a skier’s ability to ski fast than drugs do. If skiing were purely about fitness, aerobic machines like Hans Christer Holund would beat skiers with a lower VO2 max, like Petter Northug and Finn Hågen Krogh, without contest. Divergent technique revolutions, like those brought to us by pioneering skiers such as Petter Northug and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, show us just how many ways there are to win a ski race.
In his reaction to not becoming a better cyclist even while doping, Bryan Fogel shows what he is: a film director with a remarkable story to tell. As most people would, he takes his failures in sport and attributes them to his personal characteristics; he feels he is simply not good enough at a genetic level. While not everyone will reach their athletic dreams, true failure occurs only when you stop trying after the first attempt. When athletes make changes to their training, it is rare to see dramatic results in the following competition season. Some things will never yield improvements, while other things take a few years of consistent work before they take effect. In the highly competitive world of cross-country skiing in Norway, many skiers go unnoticed down the results list for years, they are seen as average, before suddenly rocketing to incredible new heights seemingly out of nowhere. That is the nature of how training, competition, and life stress the body and mind over a prolonged period of time. To take a one-year snippet of an athlete’s life and make broad conclusions about sport is naive.
An otherwise brave and instructive self-experiment that helped uncover the scope of how doping continues to mar the sporting world uncontestedly, Fogel’s conclusion of his doping experiment sends the wrong message to the audience viewing Icarus. The message he sends is that only extremely gifted humans can become great athletes. This personal look into how his experiences have affected him make his documentary engaging and dramatic, something that the genre normally lacks for your average movie audience. The devastation that Fogel portrays in this realization hits viewers hard and the movie adopts an “apocalyptic” tone from that point on. The worldwide end of clean sport is confirmed with Rodchenkov’s exposé of Russian state-sponsored doping and the footage of him escaping Russia with his life in danger. Icarus uncovers frightening realities that affect the sports we love, but the film also incites new dangers to the culture surrounding sport.
Although accurate in their severity, the events at the end of Icarus doom its audience to pessimism against the current world of sports. This acts as fuel for ungrounded accusations against successful athletes by uninformed viewers. When a complicated issue arises, people quickly try to make sense of it by looking for a distinction between good and evil. By making an issue seem black and white, anyone can have a strong opinion about it, because the choosing of sides is based on your morals. You are either against doping, or you support it. Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple, but this type of inflamed, unschooled “debate” is perfect advertising for a film such as Icarus.
When making conclusions about an issue, it is our duty to question how someone else’s portrayal of events is affecting our opinion and to keep ourselves informed. FasterSkier Editor-at-Large Chelsea Little is an example of the brave reporting and investigating that it takes to keep organizations such as WADA and the IOC held accountable. We owe it to journalists like Chelsea, who sacrifice countless hours of their personal lives to enlighten us about the issues that affect us the most, to simply read their vital research. We must take the facts from the sources available to us, and add our own informed debate to the world of sport, because angry, baseless commentary are what keep humanity from moving forward.
Most Olympic athletes…would favour lifetime bans for doped athletes. IOC President, Thomas Bach, himself an Olympic champion, has publicly indicated a personal preference for life bans, but has correctly noted that the legal order, particularly in relation to human rights issues, will not permit such automatic sanctions, for first offences. Nor does the Code. The IOC itself has lost an appeal before CAS in respect of an IOC rule providing for the automatic exclusion of any doped athletes from Olympic competition in the Olympic Games next following the imposition of even a first doping sanction. (Pound, et al. 63)
It is our responsibility as athletes to represent all of those that have helped us and to lead by example. We can start with the atmosphere that we create amongst our fellow athletes. The culture of discrimination and groundless accusations against clean, Eastern-European athletes, or any successful athlete in endurance sports, has to stop. The “blame game” has some of the same ill-effects on our sport that we are trying to prevent by fighting against doping. Remember how ashamed Canadians felt when Ben Johnson, our “Olympic champion hero”, was caught for doping? Now imagine the irreversible damage that would have been done if he had been falsely accused. By telling young athletes that anyone doing something impressive — something that we could not imagine ourselves doing — is doping, teaches young athletes that no matter how hard they work, they will never become greater than their biggest dreams.
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men [people] who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” — John F. Kennedy (“J.F.K. in Ireland”)
Teach young people to dream outside the realms of what they see as possible, and they will get there via the path you set them.
Athletes have the power to make more of a difference than just complaining about the flaws of their sport. Sports are visually flashy and exciting to an audience, and athletes are celebrated around the world for their raw fight against the limits of the human body. The hero-status of athletes gives them a sphere of influence greater than that of other members of society who work equally hard, or harder, in the goal of helping people.
The playing field of sport will never be equal for every child born on earth, when some athletes fight past obstacles far greater than the trials of sport, just to get to the start line. If we are lucky enough to be living the life of an athlete, it is not enough just to win medals.
Endurance sports may not get the same extent of attention as soccer, football, or basketball, but the popularity of these sports has elevated some athletes to leadership roles from which athletes from smaller sports can learn. Take LeBron James, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, who has recently come under fire for his comments regarding President Trump. Some feel that his place in society is to play basketball and entertain, not to comment on political events, but he has decided that his popularity gives him a greater responsibility than just playing sports:
“I mean too much to society [to ‘shut up and dribble’] … I mean too much to the youth, I mean too much to so many kids that feel like they don’t have a way out and they need someone to help lead them out of the situation they’re in.” — LeBron James (Conway)
As a Canadian, the opportunity that I have to pursue cross country skiing is a selfish privilege. I have the chance to use sport to meet new people, to inspire, and to use my experiences and influences to create a better world around me. Otherwise, I am just a lucky individual, riding on the support of those that I do little to help, enjoying what I have been given and doing little to share my wealth. I work hard at what I do, but to think that I am an inspiration to others simply through my existence would be incredibly pretentious. Athletes can gloat in their athletic prowess, or they can use their abilities to promote the joy of sport, health of body and mind, and the hard work involved in reaching a goal.
Good leadership is to rise and accept challenges even with the possibility of failure. Leaders show their true qualities, and that shows others that they can only achieve success by being their honest selves. Leaders show that there are no shortcuts.
My heart breaks every time that one of my idols is suspected of cheating. It doesn’t hurt because it’s unfair; it hurts because I saw myself in their footsteps, and every time they succeeded, I saw that I could, too. Our dreams scare us because they seem impossible from where we currently stand. When I look at my heroes, I see my future; they are living my dreams, proving them possible. My dreams are crushed when one of my favourite athletes is caught for doping, because that tells me that I am not good enough to be great. Some say that we watch the Olympics to witness the impossible happen, but I watch the Olympics to see the people who started off where I am accomplish the things that seem impossible to me now.
Despite the damning evidence against Russian sport as a whole, I refuse to believe that every Russian athlete is doping for the same reasons that I refuse to believe that the majority of top cross-country skiers are doping. It must be remembered that skiers are people, and the vast majority of people who have grown up surrounded by the positive and welcoming culture that exists in cross-country skiing around the world, do not become cheaters. Even in Norway, where skiing culture is on a much bigger scale than that of North America, it remains a community of people who love being outside year-round, exploring the world around them and the limits of their bodies.
We must keep sport a positive and safe space for people to grow into compassionate citizens of the world. Clean sport isn’t important just so that medals are handed out to the rightful winners; sport must remain possible for real people everywhere, because when doping is left unchecked, sport loses all significance as a tool to inspire, bring people together, and make the world a better place.
March 2, 2011
Alex Harvey (r) and Devon Kershaw (l) celebrating their World Championships gold in 2011 in Oslo.
My heart pounds in my chest. Adrenaline courses through my body as my ungainly 13-year old legs run chaotically down the front steps. The slam of the door behind me pierces the stillness of the heavy evening air, but to my ears the whole world is alive in celebration. The rush of blood in my ears is deafening as I relive the race in my head. Alex passing Hattestad — shushing the crowd across the line –raising his arms in disbelief — Devon and Alex playing air guitar on their skis — walking before the massive crowd to the top step of the podium — WORLD CHAMPIONS! … The excitement settles into a glow that becomes an immovable rock of confidence in my chest. I start to notice where I am, running aimlessly to the top of a grassy hill above the trees. I smile as I look down to where I came from: “Yes”, I think, “I can do it, too.”
***
Works Cited
Andrews, Edmund L. “Olympics; Finland Reels Over Skiers’ Drug Scandal.” New York Times, 13
“John F. Kennedy in Ireland.”, John F. Kennedy: Presidential Library and Museum, www.Jfklibrary.org/Exhibits/Past-Exhibits/JFK-in-Ireland.aspx. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
FasterSkier’s Alex Kochon, Nat Herz, and the author (Chelsea Little) at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Little did we know what was going on behind the scenes of those Games. Looking back at our coverage of the 2014 Olympics, I’m very proud of the work we did. But I’m not too proud to say that while we thought we had a realistic understanding of international sports governance, we were still naive to its incredible inertia.
The following is an editorial written by FasterSkier’s Editor-at-Large Chelsea Little, who has been covering doping in sport, specifically cross-country and biathlon, for the better part of the last decade. The opinions expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of other FasterSkier staff.
The athletes had been disqualified from the 2014 Games by an International Olympic Committee (IOC) Commission. This was after more than 18 months of buildup in which the world learnt of systematic manipulation of the anti-doping process by the Russian state security apparatus at those Olympics.
I was both shocked, and not shocked. When all these athletes had been disqualified by the IOC and handed lifetime bans from Olympic competition, I knew in my heart of hearts that it would be undone (I’ll explain why below). But I hadn’t, somehow, put any thought into how exactly that would come to pass. So on one level, I was surprised, even if on another level I wasn’t.
When the news broke, I had written a profanity-laced all-caps message on our company Slack channel. On Twitter, I wrote, “I am so tired. That means that they have won.” That’s about all I could muster.
“I’m sure you are extremely disappointed by the CAS ruling,” one member of my extended family wrote in an email, knowing how many nights and weekends I had spent covering this story, how many hours and days of my personal life I had erased to chase it, because doing so does not pay the bills if you work for a cross-country ski website in America.
And I was disappointed.
I had thought that those nights and weekends would help make a better sporting world, help bring cheating to light, help hold the powers that be in sport accountable and call on them to do a little better.
But it felt like all that work had accomplished nothing, not changed a single thing to make nordic sports more fair.
I can only imagine how the athletes felt. The ones who found out that they would not be receiving medals after all, medals that they felt had been stolen from them by cheaters, medals that they had been slated to finally receive but now would never see.
I can only imagine.
More than anything, I was disappointed because I didn’t understand. I’m an analyst. No analysis I could do would explain to me just what had happened because CAS did not release a reasoned argument for their decision, which, as USADA General Cousel Bill Bock pointed out, is ludicrous. So at the moment we don’t know why these athletes were cleared; we only have speculation and hearsay.
In that decision, an arbitration panel wrote that they trusted the statements of whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov and investigator Richard McLaren.
That testimony that is widely speculated to have been found untrustworthy by the arbitration panel which more recently cleared the athletes.
There is a difference between provisional suspensions and rule violations, and maybe that’s the root cause (or maybe it’s not; one day we will find out).
But if two different arbitration panels can come to two completely different conclusions about whether evidence is trustworthy, then what is the point of a “high court” of arbitration? That’s disappointing.
On the other hand, maybe the new panel did believe that the whistleblower testimony was true, but that witness statements alone are not enough to prove a doping violation. We’ll set aside for a moment all the forensic evidence [see footnote 1].
If that’s the case, it’s even more disappointing. It means that all of the rhetoric over the last few years about putting more resources into investigations will not actually result in cleaner sport, unless there is a positive test or the presence of drugs or medical equipment (see: Austrian skier Wurm, Russian skier Pankratov).
It would mean that the World Anti-Doping Agency’s new “secure digital platform” for whistleblowing — and statements by athletes and doctors and team staff — are all useless to anti-doping unless they are followed by physical evidence of prohibited substances or methods.
But we don’t know the panel’s reasoning. This is all just speculation.
I was tired and disappointed because my job as a journalist is to take complicated things, and make them make sense to our readers.
Here, there was nothing to work with. There was nothing to explain.
A second suggested storyline is that the IOC set up the cases to fail, so that it would look like they tried to do something heroic, but in the end nothing would change.
To some extent, that is absolutely the case. Lifetime bans for doping have been attempted by the IOC before. Every time, they have been overturned. There was a zero percent chance it would work this time, either.
Did the IOC go further than that in “set up to fail”? Both storylines may be true. Neither may be true. But each of these storylines is far too myopic in their attempts to explain what happened with this CAS decision.
The reason that, in my heart of hearts, I knew that things would turn out just fine for most of these seemingly disqualified athletes, is that far more than CAS is broken [2].
Broken would imply that at some point the system worked. When was that, again?
This scandal has been going on for years. And in both it and other, non-Russia-related doping scandals, organizations have dragged their feet at every turn. There is no political will to keep sport clean. Ensuring clean sport would be hard. Nobody wants to do hard work. Universally, these organizations just want to run sporting events and for fans to be happy.
“We need to stop pretending sport is clean,” International Ski Federation (FIS) President Gian Franco Kasper [3] famously told New York Times reporter Rebecca Ruiz. “It’s a noble principle, but in practice? It’s entertainment. It’s drama.”
People were mad when Kasper said this, but it was an especially revealing comment. Maybe it is a testament to our optimism that we quickly moved on, focusing on how we would try to “solve” the problem of doping.
There have been individuals and groups who have worked passionately to uncover the truth, and done an admirable job. Beckie Scott at WADA [4] is one who comes to mind. But their work is always prevented from reaching its logical conclusion.
Let’s first look at the IOC, which has deservedly gotten a bad rap for dragging its investigations out for as long as seems humanly possible.
The IOC has certainly not put the resources or good-faith effort into looking under every stone, or doing so quickly. That’s how we got the first Sochi disqualifications – like Legkov’s – being announced in November of 2017. Most of the criticism leveled at the organization on this front is absolutely justified.
In all the time between May 2016, when the Sochi scandal was first broken by the New York Times, and November 2017, the IOC did very little. The decision banning Legkov relied mostly on the same evidence that had been in the McLaren Report.
The IOC Commission asked new experts to revisit the issues of scratches on sample bottles and salt content of urine samples. Basically, they repeated a lot of work which had already been done, expanding it to a larger number of samples but taking longer to do so by insisting on using different experts, who nonetheless came to the same conclusions.
For Legkov, all of this resulted in the same evidence that had been in the McLaren Report: that Legkov’s sample bottle from after the 50 k, which he had won, showed signs of being tampered with.
Sure, the IOC Commission got testimony from Rodchenkov. But that only at the last minute, perhaps because they were publicly shamed when it was revealed that they hadn’t contacted him.
It’s fair to criticize the IOC for its anemic investigation, but this is not just an IOC problem, just like the disqualifications being overturned is not really a CAS problem.
Look further. Since the McLaren Report, few other governing bodies have been doing better.
“We like to play coy, like the cat wagging its tail when the mouse runs in front,” IBU Vice President for Medical Issues Jim Carrabre told me back at the 2014 Olympics, in an interview that led to the IBU’s media chief calling me into his office at the press center and dressing me down for talking about things that he would rather journalists didn’t ask his organization’s board members.
“It goes by once or twice, and then the third time it gets bitten,” Carrabre said at the time.
He was referring to blood profiles, a topic that has recently gained prominence.
For years I have been told by various people that the IBU has cases in the works, that soon I will hear about them, that they know some people are doping and are about to catch them.
I don’t doubt that Carrabre is a true believer in the anti-doping fight. He gets pretty fired up about things, as does fellow Executive Board member Max Cobb.
But the cases that I heard rumors of, even promises of, have never materialized.
The Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) was supposed to revolutionize anti-doping and indicate if athletes had been blood doping even when no illicit substance was detected. That sure would have been handy due to the drugs’ short detection windows and athletes’ and doctors’ strategies of “microdosing.”
But there have been no doping bans on the basis of ABP in skiing or biathlon [5]. I don’t think that even the most optimistic of fans really believes that this is because there is no blood doping going on.
What does that mean? That ABP doesn’t work, that it wouldn’t hold up in arbitration? Or that something else is going on?
It would be hard to look at IBU President Anders Besseberg’s behavior in the last two years – for instance, the IBU’s continued insistence that it’s totally fine to hold events in Russia, or his demeanor and statements during meetings with athletes – and conclude anything other than that he is sympathetic to Russia and would even more generally like to simply pretend that there was no scandal in his sport.
Having a few true anti-doping crusaders on a governing board does not clean sport make. I don’t want to put words into their mouths, but probably, it just makes these crusaders even more frustrated.
“When the McLaren Report first came out, I thought that doping was the greatest threat to our sport,” U.S. biathlete Susan Dunklee told FasterSkier in January 2017. “However after watching the last few weeks play out, I believe that the IBU’s reluctance to meaningfully act to prevent doping is the greatest threat to our sport.”
Then there is FIS. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there were 46 skiers implicated in the McLaren report. Not all of them, obviously, were at the 2014 Olympics or Paralympics, yet as far as anyone can tell, FIS has done nothing to investigate the other cases, some of which include alleged anti-doping rule violations.
(Which, by the way, how can I get in on that? Hi? I’m over here! I know a lot about doping in skiing and I also how to do statistics!)
The data is interesting, but nothing can really be done with it, as it is old and from the days before ABP was a policy. Without the journalists or their experts explaining how they decided what an “abnormal or highly abnormal” blood profile is, it’s impossible to judge what percentage of the athletes they identify as potentially having doped actually were likely dopers.
But perhaps this indicates that someone within FIS is frustrated with how things are going. If you cared about skiing being clean, cared about doing your job well, and listened to Kasper say things like “sanctioning entire countries is purely political and I do not agree with this,” you might be frustrated too.
And here’s the last thing. In this whole scandal we are talking about one country. That’s Russia, and it has led to a lot of ideological discussion.
But it’s not really about Russia.
Yes, the IOC and the IBU and FIS want to keep Russia happy, because their sports are popular in Russia, the Russian athletes are talented and popular even outside the country, because Russia is great at hosting events, and because Russian fans travel all over to watch competitions. That’s part of it.
And yes, some commentators have complained that athletes are being punished just because they are Russian. They have complained that this is a U.S.-led effort reviving Cold War hostilities. That we are Russophobes. That we are hypocrites because American sports stars dope too, and/or that lots of countries dope but we just haven’t found out about it.
But again, that’s being far too myopic about things, and believing that this scandal is only a thing unto itself, not part of the bigger problem.
If this scandal had taken place with Norway, Sweden, Germany, the United States, or any other country at the center – the outcome or the (lack of) speed of its resolution probably wouldn’t have been much different [6].
I – yes, I’m among those journalists accused of being hypocritical and anti-Russian, I’ve even been compared to Nazis, gee that was fun – I would chase this scandal just as hard if it had arisen in any of these other countries.
In fact, I would have investigated it with even more fervor if these were American or Canadian skiers and biathletes we were talking about. And presumably most of the evidence would have been in English, so I could investigate more effectively, without translating things I was looking for into Russian, searching the internet or evidence documents, and then translating the Russian back into English, in a crappy game of “telephone”.
I think that the North American athletes I routinely interview are aware that if I found out they were cheating, I would have no remorse and they would have nowhere to hide.
Just as I’m not a hypocrite, these sports organizations aren’t, either – well, they are, but not in this way, not when it comes to nationality. The claims that various decisions just come from Russian money and bribes are missing the point.
Whether coming from Russia or elsewere, these organizations don’t want a big scandal. They don’t want to rewrite their results sheets. The athletes who missed out on medals they probably should have taken home? These organizations don’t really care about athletes.
They are just an unfortunate bit of collateral damage, but oh well.
Time will march on. A new race will be held. It will be an exciting race! We will all be caught up in it.
Maybe Pellegrino will upset Klæbo.
Maybe an American will finally win a medal.
Maybe Fourcade will mess up his first stage, but then climb back to gold anyway.
Maybe Makarainen will mess up all her shooting stages, and we will all watch rapt to see whether she can pass 15 people on the final loop. Maybe she can.
Maybe Harvey will finally truly become the Prince of Quebec, crowned with an Olympic medal.
Maybe the breakaway will succeed.
Or maybe the favorite will win, but we will be enthralled until the final moment, watching to see whether they will pull it off.
Soon, we will forget about those athletes whom we were wondering about, the ones who maybe probably should have a medal stashed in their safe deposit box somewhere and a whole lot more sponsor money than they have now.
Those athletes will slip farther and farther to the back of our minds. In the forefront will be the day’s competition – so amazing! – and the big happy family that is sport.
Actual clean sport is not, and never was, these organizations’ goal.
*****
Footnotes:
[1] On the topic of skiers who were cleared by CAS: Maxim Vylegzhanin’s sample from Sochi also had scratches on it and had an incorrectly reported specific gravity; the two other members of the men’s relay team also had marks on their sample bottles, and one had a sample whose specific gravity was too high to be believable; two sprinters had marks on their sample bottles and for one, there as also a foreign fiber inside the bottle. Julia Ivanova, whose ban was not overturned by CAS, had an impossibly high salt value in her urine sample.
[2] I actually think CAS does work. CAS handles far more than doping cases – they handle contract disputes, team selection, trades, anything you can think of that would need arbitration. And as far as I know, they do a good job. This is the first CAS decision that has left me truly baffled.
[3] Term limits, man. We really, really need term limits.
[4] I’m not going to talk in much detail in this piece about WADA, which alternatingly does the right thing and the wrong thing, and often does the wrong thing for a very long time first. But at least in the last year or so, WADA is no worse than any other group, and indeed maybe a bit better.
[5] Blood profiles have certainly led to targeted testing, which caught athletes before the 2014 Olympics. But nobody bothered to try an ABP case, that we know of. Nor, seemingly, did the biathletes that the McLaren Report alleges were doping – Olga Vilukhina and Yana Romanova – fail their ABP’s. Either ABP is not being used, or it is not being successful and the details of the cases are never made public.
[6] If the perpetrator of this scandal hadn’t been Russia, I think the main difference might have been the reaction within that different country. I don’t think the Norwegian public would react the same way the Russian public has. Each place has its own culture around sport and what it means, and government also plays various different roles in supporting and controlling sport. But the reaction from the international organizations? Things would probably be much the same.
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Bessmertnykh, Maxim Vyegzhanin, and Alexander Legkov were disqualified for doping, but just had their bans overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has overturned doping bans assigned to eight cross-country skiers based on investigations into manipulation of the anti-doping process at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
“In 28 cases, the evidence collected was found to be insufficient to establish that an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) was committed by the athletes concerned,” CAS wrote in a press release. “With respect to these 28 athletes, the appeals are upheld, the sanctions annulled and their individual results achieved in Sochi 2014 are reinstated.”
The athletes whose results will be reinstated are:
50 k gold medalist and relay silver medalist Alexander Legkov
50 k silver medalist, team sprint and relay silver medalist Maxim Vylegzhanin, also fourth in the 30 k skiathlon
relay silver medalist Alexander Bessmertnykh, also seventh in the 15 k classic
Evgeny Belov, 19th in the 30 k skiathlon and 25th in the 15 k classic
team sprint silver medalist Nikita Kriukov, also 13th in the men’s sprint
Alexei Petukhov, eighth in the men’s sprint
Evgenia Shapovalova, 28th in the women’s sprint
Natalia Matveeva, 20th in the women’s sprint
The disqualifications of skiers Julia Ivanova, Yulia Tchekaleva, and Anastasia Dotsenko were upheld, although CAS held that instead of being banned from the Olympics for life, the three women were merely banned from the 2018 Games.
The cases of biathletes Olga Zaitseva, Olga Vilukhina, and Yana Romanova have not yet been handled.
The eight athletes whose disqualifications were overturned had not been invited to the 2018 Olympics, and many other Russian athletes who had not been convicted of doping offenses also did not meet the IOC’s requirements of proof of being clean either. Thus, it is doubtful whether the CAS appeals will affect the Olympic rosters.
CAS did not release any information about how the arbitration panel came to its decision.
“Although the operative part of the decision is issued, the principle of confidentiality of the procedure still applies,” Legkov’s lawyer, Christof Wieschemann, wrote in a statement emailed to the media. “I assume that all parties involved will respect this. The panel has to decide in its judgment what details of the proceedings becomes subject of the reasoning of the decision and therefore will also become public. We will wait for the reasoned decisions.”
The evidence in the McLaren report showed, for instance, that anti-doping sample bottles belonging to Legkov, Vylegzhanin, Shapovalova, and Petukhov, among others, showed marks consistent with having been tampered with. A sample belonging to Vylegzhanin also showed discrepancies in the reported specific gravity.
There was no explanation offered as to why this evidence is not valid in proving an anti-doping rule violation.
Likewise, CAS offered no explanation as to why this testimony was not sufficient to prove an anti-doping rule violation.
“Dr. Rodchenkov testified fully and credibly at CAS,” Rodchenkov’s lawyer, Jim Walden, wrote in a statement. “His truth has been verified by forensic evidence, other whistleblowers, and, more recently, recovery of the Moscow lab’s secret database, showing thousands of dirty tests that were covered up. The panel’s unfortunate decision provides a very small measure of punishment for some athletes but a complete ‘get out of jail free’ card for most. Thus, the CAS decision only emboldens cheaters, makes it harder for clean athletes to win, and provides yet another ill-gotten gain for the corrupt Russian doping system generally, and Putin specifically.”
The Russian men finishing in unison to take first, second and third in the men’s 30 k skiathlon, the final race of 2017 U23 World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. Alexander Bolshunov (8) was deemed the winner, Alexey Chervotkin (1) was second, and Denis Spitsov (11) third. All three will be going to the 2018 Olympics. (Photo: FlyingPointRoad.com)
Earlier this week it was announced that cross-country skier Sergey Ustiugov and biathlete Anton Shipulin were among the Russian athletes excluded from the 2018 Olympic Games coming up in PyeongChang, South Korea, next month.
The question arose: just who would be representing Russia?
The list of the 169 athletes on the “Olympic Athletes of Russia” team (which is not supposed to be confused with the Russian Olympic Team, which has been banned) has now been released.
For nordic sports, no athletes who had competed in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia – where the anti-doping process was manipulated to protect Russian athletes who had used banned performance-enhancing drugs – are included.
The cross-country ski team is nevertheless reasonably full. According to the Russian Ski Federation, the athletes set to compete are Alexander Bolshunov, Alexei Vitsenko, Andrei Larkov, Andrei Melnichenko, Alexander Panzhinsky, Denis Spitsov, Alexei Chervotkin, Julia Belorukova, Alisa Zhambalova, Natalia Nepryaeva, Anna Nechaevskaya, and Anastasia Sedova.
Russia’s Ekaterina Yurlova reacts after sealing her first career victory and podium on the World Cup level at IBU World Championships in the women’s 15 k individual in Kontiolahti, Finland. Yurlova will not be PyeongChang. (Photo: Kontiolahden Urheilijat/Kari Kuninkaanniemi)
The team size of five women and seven men is nearly identical to the team size from 2014, when five women and eight men represented Russia. Six of those 13 athletes who competed in Sochi have since been disqualified for doping.
For biathlon, the team for PyeongChang is tiny: just four athletes, two men and two women. According to the Russian Biathlon Union, Anton Babikov, Matvei Eliseev, Uliana Kaisheva, and Tatyana Akimova have been invited to PyeongChang. They can thus form a mixed relay team but Russia will be out of both the men’s and women’s relay competitions.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) released information this week about how the list of invited athletes had been chosen. Some criteria were as expected: it had been previously announced that no athletes who had previously served doping suspensions would be on the list, barring biathletes Irina Starykh and Alexander Loginov as well as cross-country skier Natalia Matveeva.
If an athlete’s name appeared on the “Duchess List”, a list of athletes allegedly receiving performance-enhancing drugs and whose anti-doping samples were covered up or manipulated, then that was also a disqualification, as expected.
But the IOC also used more evidence, for instance the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), a database which was copied from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory by a whistleblower and delivered to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The IOC relied, too, on information from international winter sports federations, checked Russian athletes’ whereabouts reports for discrepancies, and re-tested all previously collected anti-doping samples.
Finally, the IOC used “intelligence extracted from WADA’s ‘Speak-up’ whistleblower programme and other sources.”
The women’s podium for the first race of the 2017/2018 World Cup season, the Ruka classic sprint in Kuusamo, Finland, with (from right to left) American Sadie Bjornsen in second, Sweden’s Stina Nilsson in first, and Russia’s Yulia Belorukova in third. (photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus)
For most of the athletes who were expected to represent Russia but were then found to be excluded – like Ustiugov and Shipulin – it is not known which one of these information sources led to them being disinvited from PyeongChang.
Additional notable absences are Ekaterina Yurlova-Percht, the 2015 World Champion biathlete in the 15 k individual, and Gleb Retivykh, who made the sprint finals in both of the last two cross-country World Cup weekends.
Instead, the Russian biathlon team will feature two World Cup podium finishers: Babikov, who won a World Cup and was part of Russia’s gold-medal winning men’s relay team at 2017 World Championships, and Akimova, who likewise has a win and a third-place World Cup finish to her name.
Those two have each competed in two World Championships. Neither Kaisheva nor Eliseev have ever competed in a senior World Championships. Eliseev has three World Cup top-tens in his career.
The cross-country team’s biggest stars will be its rising U23 athletes: Bolshunov, Chervotkin, Spitsov, Belorukova, Sedova, and Nepryaeva. All have their own collections of World Cup top-tens this season, including podiums by Belorukova and Bolshunov, and Sedova’s seventh-place finish in the multi-stage Tour de Ski.
Much older is Larkov, who also had a World Cup podium this season and was a member of Russia’s 2015 and 2017 World Championships teams, and 2010 Olympic sprint silver medalist Panzhinsky.
Russians Olga Zaitseva and Olga Vilukhina competing in the pursuit at 2013 World Championships. Both were disqualified from the 2014 Olympics by the International Olympic Committee, with a whistleblower stating that the biathlon team was doping in the years leading up to Sochi.
On Friday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) posted the reasoned decision from its Disciplinary Commission, in which Russian biathlete Olga Zaitseva was disqualified from the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Zaitseva’s disqualification had been announced previously, but this is the first full-length decision presenting the evidence for the disqualification of any biathlete. Olga Vilukhina and Yana Romanova have also been suspended, but the Oswald Commission’s full decisions for their cases have not yet been released.
The reasoned decision not only contains details about Zaitseva, but also additional information which should put the whole biathlon world on notice.
“Dr. Rodchenkov further states that the entire Russian biathlon team, including the Athlete Zaytseva, has been using the Duchess Cocktail before the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014,” paragraph 359 of the decision reads. “He also provided an email sent April 2013, whereby he raised concerns about the high levels of haemoglobin for the biathlete team that was detected by his laboratory.”
The Duchess Cocktail refers to a combination of performance-enhancing drugs designed by Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory who assisted Russian teams in numerous sports to evade anti-doping rule violations before he became a whistleblower.
The Russian sports agency and the state security agency, FSB, developed a method to open anti-doping sample bottles. Using this method, they replaced the urine of athletes who had taken the Duchess Cocktail with previously-collected clean urine so that their doping would not be detected.
Thus, Rodchenkov is asserting that every Russian performance in the biathlon events at the 2014 Olympics was tainted by illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
This is notable because the men’s biathlon team, for instance, had not previously been implicated in doping scandal that has been raging for several years. Only the likely members of the women’s biathlon relay team – Vilukhina, Zaitseva, Romanova, and Irina Starykh (who was caught using the blood-doping drug EPO before the Olympics and suspended) – were on the “Duchess List,” a list of athletes presumed to have been given the drug cocktail. No male biathletes appeared.
However, it doesn’t seem surprising that they would, given that 14 cross-country skiers, virtually the entire Russian squad for Sochi, appeared on the list, as well as the female biathletes.
And that’s what Rodchenkov said, too.
“Dr. Rodchenkov… gives indications regarding the widespread use of Prohibited Subtances notably human growth hormones and EPO in the years preceding the Olympic Games,” another paragraph of the decision reads, referring to “members [of] the biathlon and cross-country skiing teams, for which the endurance is an absolutely critical elements.”
This raises the question of whether further action will be taken against more biathletes by the IOC, or by the International Biathlon Union (IBU).
The IBU has provisionally suspended the Russian Biathlon Union, but that actually has few consequences: Russia is still slated to host a World Cup weekend in March, Russian Victor Maygurov is still the First Vice President of the IBU, and all Russian athletes are still allowed to compete in the World Cup and the Olympics (Romanova, Vilukhina, and Zaitseva retired before they were suspended).
In the meantime, she has maintained her innocence. So has Wolfgang Pichler, the German coach who worked with the Russian women’s biathlon team in the four years leading up to the Sochi Olympics. For his troubles, he has been banned from attending the 2018 Olympics, where he would have coached the Swedish women’s team, which he now leads.
As the decision notes, Zaitseva and her legal team raised several objections to the case against her. She claimed that to suspend her was to pursue “collective justice” based on the widespread evidence of doping by Russia, rather than referring to any fault of her own. She also attacked Rodchenkov’s character, calling him an unreliable witness.
And finally, her team questioned the methods developed by Professor Champod at the University of Lausanne to detect whether anti-doping sample bottles had been tampered with.
That was wise, because the most damning evidence against Zaitseva comes from her sample bottles. Two of her sample bottles from Sochi had multiple marks on them consistent with tampering. In one of those bottles, the urine had such high amounts of salt that it is not possible that the concentration was produced by the human body. Together, these two pieces of evidence were used to argue that her samples had been tampered with.
According to logic used by the Disciplinary Commission in this and other cases, that tampering couldn’t have happened without Zaitseva’s knowledge. DNA testing showed that the urine in the samples was hers, which indicates that if the urine was replaced, it had to have been given by her at a different time. The Commission rejected the possibility that such a urine sample could have been collected without an athlete knowing its intended purpose.
But while two experts testifying on Zaitseva’s behalf criticized Champod’s methods as being incompletely described, they were unable to convincingly explain why their questions would absolve Zaitseva of blame.
“Neither Mr Alexei Bushin, nor Ms Evgeniya Burova did, in particular, offer any alternative explanations for the presence of marks consistent with the opening of the bottles with tools of the kind used by Prof. Champod,” the decision noted. “The IOC Disciplinary Commission finds this absence of alternative explanation even more significant in the case where one of the bottles not only bears marks strongly indicative of opening, but in addition contains urine with an abnormal salt content. Both elements support the conclusion that it was opened. The expertise of Prof. Champed convincingly demonstrates how this opening, which necessarily occurred, could be operated.”
This forensic evidence was used in the Commission’s decision that Zaitseva had violated the provision of the Anti-Doping Rules for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games which prohibits tampering with samples or with the integrity of the anti-doping process.
By doing so, they also found that she was complicit in a cover-up, thus breaking another provision of the Anti-Doping Rules.
In a strange aside, a urine sample belonging to Zaitseva but collected later, in October 2014, was analyzed in order to make a DNA comparison to the Sochi samples. What such a comparison actually revealed was that the October sample contained the urine of two different women mixed together, indicating that sample-swapping continued after the 2014 Olympics.
“This result does not concern the Olympic Games in Sochi and, as such does not fall within the scope of the application of the Rules,” the Commission wrote in its decision. “It however constitutes additional evidence that the Athlete was a protected elite athlete actively engaged in doping practices.”
The Commission also concluded that Zaitseva had used prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, on the basis of testimony from Rodchenkov.
“Use or Attempted Use of a Prohibited Substance can be established by any reliable means,” the Commission wrote. “This includes witness evidence.”
In an affidavit to the Disciplinary Commission hearing, Rodchenkov shared his own observations, many of which were based on detailed notes he had taken in a daily diary over the years. He also provided emails and documents related to Zaitseva and to the biathlon team.
“Dr Rodchenkov provides a list issued in October 2012 reflecting the clean urine bank existing at that time,” paragraph 358 reads. “The Athlete Zaytseva is mentioned on this list, with an indication that her urine was delivered to the Moscow Laboratory on 24 October 2012.”
“Dr Rodchenkov also recalled that in 2013 and early 2014 he had numerous conversations about the Athlete Zaytseva, as she was on a protected list,” another paragraph reads. “In autumn 2013, he took part to a discussion with the Athlete Zaytseva at the Ministry of Sports in Moscow. During this meeting the abnormal [Athlete Biological Passport’ data, due to her constant [performance-enhancing drugs] use, was discussed.”
And there was also evidence that Zaitseva was both doping, and also being tested more frequently than many other athletes, which is consistent with a previously-stated policy of the IBU to do “targeted testing” on athletes with suspicious biological passport profiles.
“Dr Rodchenkov specifically recalls swapping sessions of the Athlete’s numerous sample,” paragraph 361 reads. “Due to the intensity of the testing, Dr Rodchenkov underlines that they almost ran out of the Athlete’s clean urine. He remembers that the Athlete Zaytseva provided three plastic bottles of clean urine to freeze and store at the FSB and that additional urine had to be delivered.”
Zaitseva argued that Rodchenkov’s recollections and correspondence should not be used against her because of the illegal actions he had taken in the past. The Disciplinary Commission disagreed.
“Given the insistence of the Athlete’s attacks, the Disciplinary Commission will add the following,” the Commission wrote. “The Athlete refers to the past actions and behaviours of Dr Rodchenkov. In this respect, the Disciplinary Commission wants to be very clear in confirming that considering Dr Rodchenkov as a reliable witness is not in any way an approval of his past actions and his moral character. His actions, while being a director of the Moscow Laboratory, are despicable and inexcusable. This said, in a case of a conspirative scheme, the main evidence is often coming from participants, who accept to stand as witness.”
Anna Magnusson competing in the mixed relay in Östersund, Sweden, this season. The Swedish women’s biathlon team will be without its top coach at the 2018 Olympics. (Photo: Svenska Skidskyyteförbundet)
Wolfgang Pichler, the coach of the Swedish women’s biathlon team, will not be allowed to attend the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. The reason? He previously worked with Russian athletes who have now been convicted of doping violations.
The German rose to prominence as a coach when he led the Swedish team during the time of Magdalena Forsberg, coaching Anna Carin Zidek and Helena Eckholm as well. But he then left the team and decided to go to Russia.
An outspoken critic of doping who had previously called for the Russian team to be excluded from international biathlon for its raft of doping offenses, Pichler went there to clean up. He vowed to work with the women’s team, which he said had a lot of talent, and see what they could accomplish without performance-enhancing drugs.
Unfortunately, as the McLaren Report and now the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Disciplinary Commission investigations have revealed, doping did not stop in Russian biathlon after Pichler’s arrival and his public assertions about how his team would be run.
Several of his former athletes have been disqualified from the 2014 Olympics and all future Games.
Olga Zaitseva (RUS) gets encouragement from coach Wolfgang Pichler at 2013 World Championships in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic.
That includes Olga Vilukhina, who worked with Pichler at the beginning of his tenure before leaving his group and returning to Russian coach Vladimir Korolkevich.
Korolkevich had also coached several of the Russians caught doping in the past. Indeed, in the run-up to 2014, two of his athletes – Irina Starykh and Ekaterina Iourieva – were caught blood doping, in Iourieva’s case a repeat offense as she had already served a doping suspension. He is also now one of the current leaders of the Russian biathlon team.
Olga Zaitseva, who did continue working with Pichler through his entire tenure with the Russian team, was also recently disqualified by the IOC.
Pichler, who left Russia after 2014 and is now working with the Swedes again, has conceded that things may have happened behind his back. But he has insisted that he had no knowledge of doping among his athletes, and flatly disbelieves that Zaitseva was involved.
“I believe and say today that my team was clean,” he told Sport.de in January, also noting that he supported a ban on Russia competing internationally if the allegations in the McLaren Report were true: “If all that is true, as it has been said, then the Russians should have to take an Olympic break and be excluded.”
Wolfgang Pichler. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Whether he knew what was happening or not matters little. In its December 5 decision suspending the Russian Olympic Committee and mandating that Russian athletes compete in PyeongChang under the moniker “Olympic Athlete of Russia”, the IOC wrote that “No coach or medical doctor whose athlete has been found to have committed an Anti-Doping Rule Violation can be included on the invitation list” to PyeongChang.
That apparently includes Pichler. Reuters reported today that he will not be allowed to travel to the Olympics with his Swedish athletes.
“The Swedish Biathlon Federation still has strong confidence in Wolfgang, who throughout his career advocated for clean sport as an active leader, but accept and understand the IOC’s line that says that leaders who worked with Russian athletes who committed doping offences in conjunction with the Sochi Olympics in 2014 cannot attend Pyeongchang 2018,” the Swedish Biathlon Federation wrote in a press release, according to a translation.
According to Scandinavian media, the decision by the IOC cannot be appealed and the Court of Arbitration for Sport has no jurisdiction. It is not a doping case per se, and ratehr a decision by the IOC about who can be invited to its events.
This creates an unusual situation where coaches of athletes from other countries who have been suspended for doping, such as the coaches of Norwegian cross-country skiers Therese Johaug and Martin Johnsrud Sundby, Austrian cross-country skiers Johannes Düerr and Harald Wurm, or Slovenian biathlete Teja Gregorin, could be present in PyeongChang but Pichler will not.
“I was not involved in any way, not a single percent,” Pichler told Swedish paper Expressen, according to a translation. “It’s true. Everything may happen behind one’s back, of course, but I was not involved in any of it… No one is talking to me. None from [the World Anti-Doping Agency], none from the IOC. No one at all. There was no court process, no one has asked me questions or given me the opportunity to explain. What should I say? in my eyes, I am a victim, maybe a political victim.”
The young Swedish women’s team Pichler is heading may be the real victim. The women have had some strong results recently; 27-year-old Mona Brorsson was sixth in the Östersund 20 k individual, where Linn Persson and Sebastian Samuelson were fifth in the single mixed relay and the mixed relay team was also fifth. Last season, Brorsson, Persson, Hanna Oeberg, and Anna Magnusson were sixth in the women’s relay at World Championships.
“I will prepare the team the best I can,” Pichler told Expressen. “As usual, I will give 150 percent and during the Olympics I can also Skype with them.”
The Swedish team is looking for a solution so that the athletes also have a coach on the ground in PyeongChang.
Russia’s Natalia Matveeva (l) winning a World Cup sprint in January, 2017. Matveeva was sanctioned for using EPO in 2009, but has returned to competition; a provision in an IOC decision would bar her from competing in the 2018 Olympics, but is almost guaranteed to be struck down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. (Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus)
Yesterday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that while Russian athletes who are “considered clean” may compete at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, they will do so in neutral uniforms and under the moniker “Olympic Athlete from Russia” rather than as the Russian Olympic Team. The Russian national anthem wouldn’t be played if they win, although the team may be reinstated for the closing ceremonies.
That is a big step for the international sporting community in their task of dealing with Russia’s manipulation of the anti-doping system at the 2014 Olympics.
But significant as it may be, the drama is far from over as several more decisions must be taken. Individual athletes disqualified from the Olympics by an IOC Disciplinary Panel are appealing their bans to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), sport’s supreme court. Several of the provisions in the IOC’s Tuesday decision are also certain to be appealed to CAS, among them the assertion that no Russian athlete with a previous doping ban can compete in the 2018 Games.
Decisions must also be taken by individual international sports federations, like the International Ski Federation (FIS) and the International Biathlon Union (IBU). Russia has broken enough statutes of these federations that they may be suspended, which could have its own effects on the competitive field at the World Cup, the Olympics, and lower levels of competition.
And finally, there allegedly hundreds to thousands of doping cases indicated in digital forensic evidence from the Russia investigation which have not been dealt with yet because they do not involve athletes from the 2014 Olympics.
Sport Federation Statutes and Suspensions
The Russians celebrate a silver medal in the men’s 4 x 10 k cross-country skiing relay at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. After the disqualification of Alexander Legkov and Maxim Vylegzhanin, the team has been ordered to return the medals.
The 2014 FIS Anti-Doping Rules, which went into effect on January 1, 2014 (before the Olympics started that February), state that the federation can take action against national ski teams, such as barring athletes from competition or assessing fines, if there is evidence of extensive doping within the team.
Article 12.3.1 of the rules state that such action may be taken when “Four or more violations of these Anti-Doping Rules… are committed by Athletes or other Persons affiliated with a National Ski Association within a 12-month period in testing conducted by FIS or Anti-Doping Organisations…”
At the moment, eight Russian cross-country skiers have been disqualified by the International Olympic Committee for doping violations at the 2014 Olympics: Alexander Legkov, Evgeny Belov, Alexei Petukhov, Maxim Vylegzhanin, Julia Ivanova, Evgenia Shapovalova, Anastasia Dotsenko, and Julia Tchekaleva.
“In such event FIS may in its discretion elect to: (a) withdraw some or all FIS membership rights, including participation in all FIS calendar competitions, voting rights at the FIS Congress, ban all officials from that National Ski Association for participation in any FIS activities for a period of up to two years and/or (b) cancellation of the organisation of future FIS events in the disciplines concerned and/or (c) withdraw some or all FIS funding to the National Ski Association…” the rules state.
A second provision states that if four more cases are found within a 12-month period after the first four or more cases, “FIS may suspend that National Ski Association’s membership for a period of up to 4 years.”
The rules also stipulate that if “More than one Athlete or other Person from a National Ski Association commits an Anti-Doping Rule violation during an International Event… FIS may fine that National Ski Association in an amount up to CHF 50’000.–.”
FIS has yet to officially consider any of these actions, but they will likely be brought up for discussion soon.
Russian anchor Anton Shipulin celebrates his team’s gold medal in the men’s relay over Germany’s Simon Schempp. So far, no male biathletes from Russia have been implicated in the doping scandal.
In a statement released by U.S. Ski and Snowboad, CEO Tiger Shaw said, “On behalf of our athletes, we have a fundamental obligation to fight for fairness in sport, to advocate for the health and welfare of athletes and to protect the image of our sport. Now we look to the International Ski Federation (FIS) to hold a FIS Council meeting to review the IOC’s decision and related evidence to consider its impact on the Russian Ski Association, its FIS committee members, officials and athletes.”
Meanwhile, the IBU will hold an Executive Board meeting this weekend, in which it may address violations of its own statutes.
The IBU did not implement rules similar to the FIS rules regarding suspending member federations or canceling events on the basis of repeated doping offenses until its 2014 Congress, which was held after the Sochi Olympics. But Russia may have violated other IBU statutes.
In the 2012 IBU Rules, it is stated that “The IBU may impose a fine either by requesting payment or by withholding financial support from a member federation if more than one athlete or more than one person from such member federation commits a violation of the IBU Anti-Doping Rules during a 12-month period.”
In the same edition of the rules, a provision states that “IBU member federations that are full members may be suspended by the Executive Board, for up to two years, until the next IBU Congress if they do not fulfill their obligations stated in Art. 2.3.2.”
Among the “Obligations of Full Members” described in that article is, “to comply with the IBU Constitution and Rules.” Two of the “Objectives” listed in the IBU Consitution are “to prevent doping in biathlon” and “to prevent all methods and practices that might jeopardize the integrity of biathlon competitions.”
All of the athletes banned by the IOC, additionally, may see sanctions from their relevant international federations. The skiers and biathletes are currently under provisional suspensions from FIS and the IBU, and doping hearing panels will (eventually) consider the evidence against them and decide whether to bring anti-doping rule violations. The time frame for that is unclear.
Likely CAS Rulings
There are already 22 appeals registered at CAS by athletes who were disqualified from the 2014 Olympics by the IOC’s Disciplinary Commission.
Alexander Legkov is one of 22 Russian athletes appealing their disqualifications to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. (Photo: Marcel Hilger)
Thus it is likely, but not guaranteed, that the retroactive disqualification from the 2014 Games will remain standing.
(Then there’s the question of getting the medals back: biathlete Yana Romanova said that “I’d rather throw my medal in the dumpster, than return it to the IOC,” referring to the silver medal she was given in the women’s relay and was ordered to return after her disqualification.)
Besides disqualifying the atheltes from the 2014 Games, the IOC Disciplinary Commission decisions also banned them from all future Olympics. There is no provision for lifetime suspensions on a first doping offense in the World Anti-Doping Code, so this could be a real fight at the CAS level.
Similarly, the IOC’s Tuesday decision included a ruling that no Russian athlete who had ever been suspended for an Anti-Doping Rule Violation could compete in the 2018 Olympics. That is very unlikely to stand, as the Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled several times, in different specific circumstances, against past doping violations being used anew to bar athletes from competing in a new set of events.
Aside from the issue of double jeopardy, there would be an inherent unfairness to preventing Russian athletes who had completed doping suspensions from competing, while others who had served and completed similar suspensions were allowed to participate.
Athletes who may challenge this provision include cross-country skier Natalia Matveeva and biathlete Alexander Loginov, both of whom finished their suspensions for using EPO, and have since returned to competition.
In comparison, Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway and Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland have both served doping suspensions and will almost certainly be on the start line.
Outstanding Cases
Finally, there are many more cases that have not yet been handled.
The IOC has so far only suspended athletes involved in a doping cover-up scheme at the 2014 Olympics. But in the course of the investigation of that scheme, evidence came to light of many, many more cases outside of the Games.
Italy placed second in the mixed relay at the IBU World Cup in Canmore, Alberta, in 2016. Karin Oberhofer (second from l) is the 2014 Olympic bronze medalist in the sprint after the disqualification of Russia’s Olga Vilukhina for doping. (Photo: Daniel S. Guay)
And not only Italy – but specifically, Karin Oberhofer.
The then-28-year-old was part of the mixed relay team which won bronze, along with Lukas Hofer, Dominik Windisch, and Dorothea Wierer. Oberhofer will now receive her bronze medal in the sprint as well, where she finished 27.9 seconds behind gold medalist Anastasia Kuzmina of Slovakia with ten-for-ten shooting. Before 2014, she had never stood on an individual podium at the top level of competition.
“I would be very happy to belatedly receive the Olympic bronze medal,” Oberhofer – who was officially fourth at race time, while now-disqualified Vilukhina was officially second – wrote in an email. Her comments were made in German and translated into English.
Vilukhina, meanwhile, has said that she refuses to give back silver medals from the relay and the sprint.
“I won’t just give up the medals,” she told sports.ru, according to a translation. “I’m a two-time Olympic medalist.”
The International Olympic Committee, however, has ordered that her medals be returned, and notified the Italian Olympic Committee that Oberhofer will be getting bronze.
“Of course everything has a bitter aftertaste, but I would say: ‘better late than never’,” Oberhofer wrote. “It would be wonderful for me if my performance on that day would now be crowned with the bronze. It would also mean to me that justice has finally won.”
Since the Olympics, Oberhofer also won two bronze medals at 2015 World Championships, in the mass start and the women’s relay. The same season, she was second in a World Cup sprint.
Then, Oberhofer took a break last season to prepare her first child, Paul, who was born in August. She has continued training but has not raced yet this season.
“I am very happy with my little family and about my new challenge,” Oberhofer wrote. “Every day with my little son is unique and indescribably beautiful. It’s not always easy, but my family helps me a lot and I love doing sports. I do it because I like to do it, and little Paul allows me to do it and is very well-behaved. At the moment I am at home and prepare myself individually for the competitions. I have to qualify again for the international competitions first.”
Oberhofer has known for nearly a year that her Olympic sprint was likely medal-worthy. When the McLaren report released its evidence packet, the names of four Russian biathletes, including Vilukhina, were not redacted in one of the documents.
“11 months ago there were already these rumors, and several members of the media contacted me about that,” Oberhofer wrote. “[Recently] I was contacted by Giovanni Malagó, President of the Italian National Olympic Committee, who informed me that Vilukhina had been banned and removed from the list of results.”
Oberhofer isn’t sure whether there will be some medal ceremony arranged for the one she missed out on in Sochi.
“Honestly, I don’t really know what to say about that,” she wrote. “It would be a big surprise for me if it took place in public. But that’s not so important. The most beautiful thing for me would be to get the medal at all. But what I do know is that I would belatedly celebrate this medal with my family and friends in a small ceremony.”
Biathletes Veronika Vítková, Jitka Landová, Gabriela Koukalová, and Eva Puskarčíková after a 2015 relay in Oslo, Norway. The Czech women learned that they would receive an Olympic bronze medal after the Russian team has been disqualified for doping. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
(Editor’s note: This article contains explicit language.)
The U.S. women finished seventh in the Sochi relay, and some athletes spoke out about how much it would have meant to be sixth not three years later, but the day they competed.
“It only took us 4 years, but now our historic 7th place is actually 6th…tying the best ever Olympic relay result for US Biathlon – men or women!” team member Sara Studebaker wrote on Facebook. “It’s unfortunate it took 4 years for this to happen. Because we were 7th instead of 6th, some teammates missed out on being pre-qualified for events and getting monetary support… Doping affects all athletes at some level. There is no excuse.”
“The ripple effect from athletes doping feels even more personal now,” she wrote. “It’s wild to think about what would have been different for us with a 6th place relay at the Olympics instead of 7th. Thanks Russia for the flower ceremony at the Olympics that we didn’t get to have, A-team status and funding for 2015, and pre-qualification for the World Cup.”
Canada finished eighth in the relay and will now move up to seventh.
Vilukhina earned a silver medal in the 7.5-kilometer sprint; that means that Vita Semerenko of Ukraine will be upgraded from bronze to silver, and Karin Oberhofer of Italy will earn bronze, the first individual Olympic medal of her career.
Then there is the relay, where both Vilukhina and Romanova represented Russia. They took silver with teammates Olga Zaitseva and Ekaterina Shumilova. The Norwegian team will now move from bronze to silver, and the Czech team will now earn bronze.
Gabriela Koukalová posted on her Facebook page about how frustrated she was with the scandal. A translated version reads,
“I know that you all know… I mean about our Olympic medal from Sochi for the women’s relay, which we are going to receive with almost four years of delay. On one side it’s great that justice was achieved, but on the other side I am truly sorry for Eva Puskarčíková and mostly for my lifelong friend Jitka Landová, who had to end her biathlon career due to medical reasons. She spent almost her entire career with hard work and without any memories of success. I am not sure about you, but I want to turn doping into a crime and not allow Russian Federation to start at the Winter Olympics, like it already happened at the Summer Games! I also would like to stress one more goal, and that is more important than victories. Their names are HONESTY AND FAIRNESS, not only in sport but overall in the life! Too bad that they [Russians] hadn’t figured that one yet! And now I would like to move on from this topic…”
Meanwhile, Landová isn’t sure that a medal would have changed the trajectory of her career, saying that she doesn’t look back. But she does wish she’d had the medal earlier, she said in a Czech radio interview.
“Last night I received a message from Eva Puskarčíková that we really had the Sochi medal,” Landová said, according to a translation. “I looked at it first with disbelief, because as long as I have no tangible evidence, I just don’t believe it. From the very beginning, we knew the Russians were not clean.”
“I do not know whether to be glad or cry,” Puskarčíková told the same radio broadcaster.
The pushback against the women on social media has been swift and severe.
The number of comments below Koukalová’s Facebook post calling her stupid and a disgrace are too many to count, as are those telling her to stick to sport and “worry about your performance,” a comment that sometimes had a foreboding connotation. Other comments call her a “b*tch” or a “f*cking b*tch.” Still others compare her to Nazis or fascists.
Then there are the threats.
“Russia will be wait you on World Cup in Tyumen 2017… you want to get negative before the Olympic Games? ok, you will get it!,” wrote one poster, following this with an emoji of a punching fist.
“you have found enemies in the face of 300 million people… be careful,” one commenter wrote.
“Can be you sure that your test-tube Ok or someone scratch it and you will be deprived of all medals,” another threatened.
Instagram was, if anything, worse – even though that’s not the platform where the athletes had made any of their comments.
On the account “jitka_official_landova”, which it is not clear is actually maintained by Landová, received hate on nearly all of the posts, even though the last post was only from 2015 and the account has no recent activity. Under a picture of Landová posted in February, 2015, one comment reads, “prostitutky,” which translates from to “prostitutes”.
There are several Instagram pages attributed to Koukalová, some of which are clearly fan pages and two which are verified by Instagram (calling into question the efficacy of the verification system, but that’s another story.) It’s unclear if either of the two verified accounts are operated by Koukalová; there is no link to Instagram from her website.
But regardless of whether comments left there are actually reaching her, a lot are being posted regardless. Many are filled with emojis of livestock like pigs and sheep, and feces. The pigs and excrement were often accompanied by a lipstick emoji; Koukalová has a contract to appear in makeup ads.
On a page seeming to really belong to Koukalová, she was repeatedly called “scum.”
“you’re a lying b*tch!” one commenter wrote in English. “You are fascist,” wrote another. “You are one disgraceful sh*tty slut,” another commenter added.
Then there were those written in Russian, which translated to, if anything, worse comments:
“Go in a hole and don’t come back”
“prostitute”
“burn in hell”
“F*ck you, f*cking b*tch, no one will remember you and the medal”
“You b*tch”
“you don’t take medals, you only take it in the mouth”
“piece of sh*t”
“The end”
After one Russian fan writes a supportive message, another replies, “burn at the stake with her, sheep.”
Comments also riddled posts on an account which appeared to be maintained by fans.
“Such animals must be hung!” one comment translated from Russian read. Some others:
“Better not come to Tyumen!”
“Whore”
“Her brains are only enough to paint her face”
“Wash it, it’s a man”
“Lose weight, you’re so fat”
Many mention the phrase “life is a boomerang”. “Remember everything comes back, it’s the rule of life and your joy for getting not yours medal will turn into tears soon,” one comment written in English says.
Koukalová is not competing in the opening World Cup weekend in Östersund, Sweden, as she is still recovering from a calf injury. Many comments stated that they hoped she would never return to competition, or if she did, that she would lose every race. See this link for a good example. Take a look.
In the 15 k individual today, the first individual race of the World Cup season, Puskarčíková finished seventh with perfect 20-for-20 shooting; Vítková finished 12th with two penalties.
Hours after this photo was taken and Alexander Legkov had won Olympic gold, Russian anti-doping head Grigory Rodchenov has said that he switched out Legkov’s anti-doping sample for a vial of clean urine collected previously. Legkov has been stripped of his gold medal and banned from all future Olympic Games.
In it: a description of how a second laboratory independently confirmed a finding from the McLaren Report that two of Legkov’s urine sample bottles from Sochi had been tampered with.
The decision also reveals that Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director who in truth managed a covert doping program before turning whistleblower, personally tested Legkov’s urine as part of a “washout scheme” to see how quickly drugs disappeared from his body.
Rodchenkov also said that he swapped out the urine sample collected after Legkov won a gold medal in the 50 k for a previously-collected clean sample.
However, Vilukhina won silver in the 7.5 k sprint, and this finding means that Ukraine’s Vita Semerenko stands to be upgraded from bronze to silver and Karin Oberhofer of Italy would become the new bronze medalist.
Vilukhina also finished seventh in the 10 k pursuit, 21st in the 15 k mass start, and contributed to Russia’s silver medal in the women’s relay, along with Romanova. That means that the Norwegian team of Fanny Horn Birkeland, Tiril Eckhoff, Ann Kristin Flatland, and Tora Berger would move from bronze to silver, and the Czech Republic’s Eva Puskarcikova, Gabriela Koukalova, Jitka Landova, and Veronica Vitkova should earn bronze.
Legkov has been anything but out of the news. He was targeting a comeback for the 2018 Olympics after sitting out last year with a provisional doping suspension. Legkov and five other skiers had been cleared to return to competition by the International Ski Federation (FIS) despite their IOC bans, with FIS saying that they had to read the IOC decisions in full before taking any action.
During that time, Evgeniy Belov finished sixth in the 15 k classic at the World Cup in Ruka, Finland, on Saturday, and 12th overall in the weekend-long minitour; Maxim Vylegzhanin was 16th in the classic and 20th overall; and Evgenia Shapovalova finished seventh in the women’s sprint and 54th in the minitour overall.
Alexey Petukhov did not compete on the World Cup and the last of the six athletes, Julia Ivanova, has retired.
Legkov did not compete on the World Cup either. Coach Marcus Cramer told Norwegian media outlet VG that after having his gold medal from the Olympic 50 k stripped, Legkov has become depressed and lost five kilograms.
It remains to be seen what FIS will do with the Legkov decision, and when the IOC will publish decisions for the other Russian skiers. All or none of those athletes may be back on the starting line in when the World Cup moves to Lillehammer, Norway, this coming weekend.
In the meantime, here are some key parts of the decision, which you can read in full here.
What proof is needed:
The panel noted that before the 2016 Summer Olympics, the IOC did not ban all Russian athletes but instead shifted the burden onto the athletes to prove that they were clean: “…. the IOC considered that the revelations of Prof. McLaren were so serious and so far-reaching that it was justified to establish a presumption that all top-level Russian athletes had been part of that system and that only the athletes who could rebut such a presumption would be accepted at the Games.”
The IOC panel did not want to do this for winter sports athletes, instead considering individual cases. But they also noted that finding proof of doping would not require a positive drug test, because by nature this scandal is about covering up positive tests and thus that evidence would have been destroyed.
“The evidence of a cover-up is typically either witness evidence or circumstantial evidence from which the application of the process can be inferred,” they wrote. “For the purpose of anti-doping proceedings, CAS jurisprudence has defined a specific standard, defined as ‘comfortable satisfaction of the hearing panel bearing in mind the seriousness of the allegation which has been made’,” they wrote.
Further down in the document, the panel noted that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS, mentioned above, and the Supreme Court equivalent in sports law) has already signaled that it would accept circumstantial evidence.
In another decision, CAS had written that “the combination and different type of facts provided by the Second [McLaren] IP report with respect to any individual athlete are circumstantial evidence that can be used to establish an [anti-doping rule violation.”
The Panel Trusts the McLaren Report, and Rodchenkov
While the panel did commission some of its own forensic analyses of urine sample bottles, it also relied on evidence gathered by Professor Richard McLaren for an Independent Person Report almost a year ago.
“The global evidence obtained by Prof. McLaren is very strong with regard to the existence of the scheme,” the panel wrote. “It allows a conclusion about the existence and implementation of the scheme in Sochi (and well beyond Sochi), which Prof. McLaren describes as ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The Disciplinary Commission can only agree with that conclusion.”
“The relevance of the elements related to individual athletes has to be considered from a different perspective,” the panel wrote, before concluding that “Prof. McLaren’s credibility is unquestionable.” His evidence would be used as part of a case against athletes, although not the only evidence.
The panel also said that they trusted Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow lab director who became a whistleblower. He has been the victim of character assassination by Russian interests, but the panel did not buy it.
“Dr. Rodchenkov was the main actor in the system and he is the best placed person to explain what it was,” they noted. “Dr. Rodchenkov is no longer in Russia and he is under the protection of the FBI. Therefore he is now free to speak openly…. His statements are very precise and clear. They are also very consistent and there are no contradictions between the various elements he describes… Every time other evidence has been available, the information provided by Dr. Rodchenkov has been systematically corroborated by such evidence.”
The Panel’s Own Forensic Analysis
The IOC commissioned a forensic analysis of urine sample bottles, to be done at the University of Lausanne. The McLaren Report had already done this task using a respected lab in London, but the panel called the Lausanne analysis “a more complete and thorough forensic analysis.”
It took Professor Christophe Champod, the leader of the analysis, two months to discover how sample bottles could be opened and closed. Like the London lab, he examined sample bottles for marks that would indicate that they had been opened using the method he had discovered – and he found bottles with these typical marks on them. Reportedly, examining each of the 232 sample bottles and 30 control bottles he was given took over an hour.
The panel was deliberate in emphasizing repeatedly how carefully Champod had done this work – perhaps because they had been criticized for allowing this aspect of the process to take so long and allow a situation where the provisional suspensions of Russian skiers were lifted by FIS.
“Prof. Champod appeared to be very knowledgeable and very cautious at the same time,” the panel wrote. “When not sure, he never hesitated to admit that he had no certainty. This gave a lot of credibility to the positions of which he claimed to be certain.”
As with the sample bottles the IOC also commissioned a “complete and thorough” investigation of salt levels in the sample bottles, another task which had also been done by the McLaren report. This analysis was done at the Lausanne University Hospital. The professor investigating the urine samples found that a number of samples had salt concentrations “definitively out of range and even out of renal physiological possibilities suggesting strongly a manipulation of the samples for example the addition of sodium chloride.”
Bad News About That
Overall, the panel had come to the conclusion that the sample manipulation and cover-up scheme existed, and that the only way for it to do so was for athletes to be involved. After all, the clean urine samples had to be obtained from somewhere.
“The Disciplinary Commission came to the conclusion that it was not possible that the athletes were not fully implicated… the scheme could not work without the personal implication of the athletes.”
Thus, if the athlete was mentioned in planning documents (called the “Duchess List” and the “Medals By Day List”), they more or less must have been in on the scheme, the panel wrote.
Legkov was on the Duchess List, and moreover, two of his sample bottles showed marks of being tampered with. These where the types of bottles that Prof. Champod was “certain” about.
Furthermore, in a written affidavit, Rodchenkov discussed Legkov specifically, saying that he had at some point checked urine samples provided by Legkov to make sure that the drugs had disappeared, or “washed out”. Washout tests are used to see how long drugs stay in an athlete’s body. This enables planned doping programs and ensures that athletes will not test positive if they are tested by a foreign antidoping agency. Such tests are prohibited by anti-doping rules.
Rodchenkov also said that he had discussed how Legkov was responding to the drugs he had been given – the answer was, he was responding well – and also that he had personally swapped the athletes urine samples in Sochi on the night after Legkov won his gold medal. The relevant sample, collected after that race, was one of the two sample bottles which showed marks consistent with tampering.
“Based on the above elements, the Disciplinary Commission has no hesitation to conclude that it is more than comfortably satisfied that the athlete was a participant in, and a beneficiary of, the cover up scheme implemented on the occasion of the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014.”
What Legkov Provided As Evidence
Legkov and his lawyer submitted affadavits from Elena Valbe, the president of the Russian Cross-Country Ski Federation, as well as from his coaches and team staff, stating that nobody knew he was providing clean urine for the sample-swapping scheme.
He also listed all of the anti-doping tests he had undergone, but the panel was not convinced.
“As regards the allegation that the athlete could not have used the Duchess Cocktail because of the intensity of testing he was subject to, the Disciplinary Commission remarks that the history of doping is full of highly controlled athletes, who never tested positive, until they finally had to admit that they had been doping over a long period of time,” the panel wrote.
And, Legkov pointed out contradictions and seeming errors in some of the McLaren Report evidence. Again, the panel did not agree with Legkov’s assertions.
“The Athlete has sought to challenge each individual piece of evidence, but when all the pieces match and comfort each other, no doubt is possible.”
A Bizarre Squabble Over DNA
Legkov and his lawyer wanted the samples assumed to be his, to be DNA tested to make sure that his urine was inside them. This was mistakenly assumed to have been done in the McLaren Report, but it turned out that only some of the Sochi samples had been analyzed in this way. Thus, late in the hearing process, Legkov requested that the IOC get a DNA sample from him, and see if the urine samples matched.
The implication was that if they did not match, then he would not have been the one providing the “clean urine” to swap out, and thus would not be implicated in the scheme.
This led, however, to a game of chicken. Legkov was training in Italy at the time. The IOC requested he come to Lausanne to have the DNA sample collected. Legkov insisted that the IOC come to Italy. The IOC offered to have a car sent to Italy to pick him up, bring him to Lausanne, and then return him, saying that it was necessary to come to Switzerland “for the collection of a reference sample under adequate conditions to avoid the risk of contamination by foreign DNA.”
In the end, no agreement could be reached, and Legkov’s DNA was never collected or matched to the urine in the sample bottles.
The IOC did not see this as a barrier to their conclusions: for the subset of samples which had been DNA-tested in the McLaren Report, all those belonging to athletes on the Duchess List turned out to match the DNA in the sample bottles.
For two female hockey players, DNA did not match. But the reasoning by the investigators was that these athletes were not on the Duchess List and had been added into the doping scheme at the last minute, so they took the drugs but had not provided clean urine and thus their samples had to be swapped out with someone else’s urine.
Russian team staff cheer on Maxim Vylegzhanin, the country’s anchor skier, in the 4 x 10 k relay at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Vylegzhanin has now become the second member of that silver-medal relay team to be disqualified for doping.
All four were identified in the McLaren Report, an independent investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate reports from whistleblowers that Russia had systematically evaded the anti-doping process at the 2014 Olympics.
“The athletes have been disqualified for life from taking part in the Olympic Games,” Valbe said.
With Legkov’s disqualification, Russia had already lost a gold medal in the 50 k and a silver medal in the 4 x 10 k relay.
Vylegzhanin had finished second in the 50 k, but with him now disqualified as well, there could be a substantial medal re-allocation. Third-place Ilia Chernousov, also from Russia but not implicated the McLaren report, would stand to gain gold. Fourth-place Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway would take silver, and fifth-place Sergei Dolidovich of Belarus would earn bronze.
Vylegzhanin also won silver in the men’s team sprint with Nikita Kriukov. With that result invalidated, Sweden’s Emil Jönsson and Teodor Peterson will move from bronze to silver, and fourth-place Northug and Ola Vigen Hattestad would earn bronze.
Valbe said that the IOC Disciplinary Commission’s decision will be appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, so such medal reallocations are not yet finalized.
“It’s hard to choose words, but I’ll fight to the end — it’s a violation of all human rights,” Petukhov said, according to a translation.
Petukhov finished eighth in the skate sprint in Sochi; Shapovalova finished 28th. Ivanova was part of the sixth-place women’s relay and team sprint teams, both of which stand to be disqualified, and finished 17th in the 10 k classic and 30th in the 30 k skate.
The Canadian team of Perianne Jones and Dasha Gaiazova missed qualifying for team sprint finals as “lucky losers” by one spot. The Russian pair of Ivanova and Anastasia Dotsenko, however, did advance as lucky losers – meaning that if they had not been in the race, the Canadians would have been next in line for a spot in the finals.
The silver-medal winning Russian men’s relay team at the 2014 Olympics. Alexander Legkov (right) was sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee for doping, and as a result the Russian team’s relay result will be invalidated.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ruled that Russian cross-country skiers Alexander Legkov and Evgeniy Belov doped at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
As a result, Legkov’s gold medal in the 50-kilometer freestyle mass start, the Russian men’s silver medal in the 4 x 10 k relay, and Legkov’s 10th-place finish in the 30 k skiathlon are all invalidated, as are Belov’s 18th-place finish in the skiathlon and his 25th-place result in the 15 k classic.
The ruling states that Legkov must return his medals.
Significantly, the two athletes are also “declared ineligible to be accredited in any capacity for all editions of the Games of the Olympiad and the Olympic Winter Games subsequent to the Sochi Olympic Winter Games.” That means they won’t be able to compete in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.
The Oswald Commission also left it up to the International Ski Federation (FIS) to “consider any further action within its own competence.”
The decision is partially a result of hearings held on Monday, where the athletes were present. Several other Russian skiers also had hearings on the same day, and the results of their cases have not yet been announced.
The decision released was a summary, and the detailed reasoning behind it is not yet available.
The athletes will have the option of appealing the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and a statement from the athletes’ lawyer says that they will do so “at the latest tomorrow.”
(Update #1) It is unknown what evidence the Oswald Commission primarily relied on to make its decision, but CAS has signaled that it largely trusts evidence from the McLaren report, the investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which back in 2016 revealed manipulation of the anti-doping process at the 2014 Olympics.
The Oswald Commission was intended to gather additional evidence. It also re-examined anti-doping sample bottles from Sochi. Professor Richard McLaren had sent the bottles to a forensic analysis lab in London, which determined that the bottles had been tampered with. The Oswald Commission asked a laboratory at the University of Lausanne to develop its own procedure to confirm this finding.
Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory who turned whistleblower to The New York Times and whose testimony formed a large basis of the McLaren report, reportedly testified to the Oswald Commission on Saturday.
One aspect of the decision seems potentially vulnerable to appeal. In the past, CAS has ruled that lifetime Olympic bans are not allowed. In those cases, however, its reasoning was more concerned with putting athletes into double jeopardy than to an inherent problem with the concept of a lifetime ban.
In 2008, the IOC put into force what was deemed the “Osaka Rule”, stating that any athlete who had served a doping ban longer than six months could not compete in the next Olympics, even if their suspension was completed. An American athlete, LaShawn Merritt, appealed this to CAS, which found in his favor that the IOC could not, in effect, lengthen a suspension which had already been determined by a different organization.
The decision turned on considerations of double jeopardy, the principle that a person should not be punished a second time for an action which had already been adjudicated. CAS was concerned that an athlete in these circumstances would be punished twice for “the same behavior.” The Merritt decision does not seem to establish that a lifetime Olympic ban is per se impermissible, if reached for the correct procedural and substantive reasons.
Then, ahead of the 2012 Olympics, the British Olympic Association tried to insert a provision into their team qualification procedures that any athlete who had previously served a doping ban was ineligible for the Games, even if their suspension had been completed. CAS knocked this down, deeming the additional ban an illegal “extra sanction” that was not in compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code.
(Update #2) Elena Välbe, head of the Russian Ski Federation for cross-country skiing, did discuss the hearings in the Russian press to some extent. She indicated that the Lausanne lab had found problems with some of the sample bottles. “They found that … some of our athletes also had them, probably the biggest problem in this respect is with Alexander Legkov,” she told R-Sport on Monday, according to a translation, before adding, “but, in fact, there is no other evidence.”
Sources also indicated to R-Sport that the other four Russian skiers whose cases are being considered — Julia Ivanova, Evgenia Shapovalova, Alexey Petukhov and Maxim Vylezhanin — will likely get the same treatment that has been given to Legkov and Belov.
Indeed, Vylegzhanin – another member of the Russian relay team, and the silver medalist in the 50 k – told sports.ru that “If such a verdict is passed on them, then this can be expected for us.”
(Update #3) If both Legkov and Vylegzhanin are disqualified, there could be a substantial medal re-allocation in the men’s 50 k. Third-place Ilia Chernousov, also from Russia but not implicated the McLaren report, would stand to gain gold. Fourth-place Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway would take silver, and fifth-place Sergei Dolidovich of Belarus would earn bronze.
In the men’s relay, third-place France (Jean Marc Gaillard, Maurice Manificat, Robin Duvillard, and Ivan Perillat Boiteux) would earn silver, and fourth-place Norway (Eldar Rønning, Chris Andre Jespersen, Sundby, and Petter Northug) would earn bronze.
Vylegzhanin also won silver in the men’s team sprint with Nikita Kriukov. Were that result invalidated, Sweden’s Emil Jönsson and Teodor Peterson would move from bronze to silver, and fourth-place Northug and Ola Vigen Hattestad would earn bronze.
It would be a huge reversal for the Norwegian men’s cross-country team, which originally won only two medals in Sochi (gold by Hattestad in the sprint and bronze by Sundby in the 30 k skiathlon). This seeming underperformance was a source of disappointment to the team and the nation at the time.
“We do not know the details and only have information through the media, but this is a sad and disappointing day for international skiing,” Norwegian Ski Federation President Erik Røste said in a press release, according to a translation. “We are now awaiting a reason for the IOC’s decision, and many suggest that we will get more detailed information in the days to come… those involved have already stated that they will appeal the judgments, and we hope there will be a final decision as quickly as possible.”
“This is just sad for cross-country sports, no matter what the conclusions of the case are… If this ends with me receiving Olympic medals, I won’t enjoy them with this backdrop,” Sundby said in the same press release.
Were the medals to be reallocated in this way, several athletes would become first-time medalists. That includes Dolidovich, who never podiumed at the international level but was fourth in the 30 k skiathlon at the 2011 World Championships and fifth in the 50 k mass start at 2009 World Championships, as well as having eleven World Cup top-10’s.
It would also be the first time Norway’s Rønning or Jespersen received Olympic medals; Rønning had won four World Championships relay gold medals for Norway, as well as a sprint bronze of his own in 2009, but Jespersen was a first-time Olympian who had never before competed at a World Championships.
After anchoring Norway to fourth in the men’s 4 x 10-kilometer relay at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Petter Northug congratulates the Russian silver medalists, including anchor Maxim Vylegzhanin. As a result of the IOC’s decision to sanction two Russians that competed in Sochi, Russia is to return its relay medal; Norway will thus be awarded bronze and France silver.
This article has been updated to include comments from Canadian World Cup Team member Alex Harvey as told to Le Journal de Montrealon Wednesday.
“Hell yes, IOC. Finally starting to take some action,” U.S. Ski Team (USST) member Simi Hamilton wrote on Twitter. “I have a feeling pressure from us clean athletes has paid off!”
“Today marks a win for clean athletes,” USST Women’s Coach Matt Whitcomb tweeted. “Two cheats are out. It’s a start.”
The Russian men’s relay team meets Maxim Vylegzhanin at the finish after he anchored them to silver in the 4 x 10 k at the Sochi Olympics. The IOC recently ruled that the Russian team’s relay result should be invalidated and they are to return their medals.
Norway’s Petter Northug posted a photo on Instagram of what looked like brunch in a tropical setting with the words: “Feire OL bronse!” (translates to “Celebrating Olympic bronze!”). Northug already has four Olympic medals to his name, two of which are gold (all from the 2010 Olympics), but the men’s 4 x 10-kilometer Olympic relay medal from 2014, which will be awarded retroactively to the Norwegian team (after they placed fourth behind Sweden in first, Russia in second and France in third) will be the first medal for Northug’s teammates Eldar Rønning and Chris Andre Jespersen.
Later on Wednesday, Northug posted a jocular meme on Instagram, picturing himself racing in the Sochi relay with the words: “You know you are the best anchor when you bring the medal home 4 years after the race.”
Legkov was part of Russia’s silver-medal relay in Sochi, and as a result of the IOC’s ruling, he must return the two medals he won there (relay silver and 50 k gold). Additionally, the 2014 Olympic results of Legkov and Belov are to be voided and both athletes are barred from competing at (or being granted credentials to) future Olympics. However, both are expected to appeal the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) by this Thursday at the latest.
“It is weird to get the medal in the mail. But if he gets convicted, of course I will take it,” Jespersen told Norway’s Nettavisen, according to a translation. “It’s my only Olympic medal. It is clear I will take it.”
In an interview with Le Journal de Montreal, Alex Harvey, the leading member of the Canadian World Cup Team who finished third in the overall World Cup and second in the distance standings last season, said he had his suspicions about Legkov — particularly after the 50 k freestyle mass start (in which Harvey placed 19th).
Canada’s Alex Harvey (front, bib 19) racing in the freestyle sprint at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He finished 19th on the day. Also pictured: Russia’s Sergey Ustiugov (2) made it to the final and placed fifth. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
“On the climbs, we could see he was artificially stronger than the rest,” Harvey said, according to a translation. “In Sochi, the last two kilometers were filled with big climbs. It was a course made for Russians knowing that they were doping.”
He added that the end of each course in Sochi ended with a long, brutal uphill that was exceptionally “physically demanding”.
As for the recent doping bans involving professional cross-country skiers, Harvey said, “It’s a shame because our sport is now compared with cycling. It is in cross-country skiing and in biathlon that the largest number of dope cases occur.”
And while he was in favor of the IOC’s decision, he hoped the buck wouldn’t stop there.
“I’m happy that the IOC finally acted, but Russian skiers are still racing … and one in particular who wasn’t bad in Lahti,” he said, alluding to Sergey Ustiugov, who took gold or silver in all five races he competed in at Lahti World Championships.
“Ustiugov was young at the Sochi [Olympic Games], but he still reached the final in the sprint,” Harvey said. “Three of the top six men fell, but he was on his way to a podium that day. What the McLaren Report revealed was that the full team was involved in doping. But Ustiugov’s name never came out. And as long as his name doens’t come up, we can only have doubts.”
Meanwhile, the law firm representing Legkov and Belov is enraged, according to Nettavisen.
“The decision deserves the term scandal,” the Wieschemann firm stated in its press release on Wednesday. “[It] mocks the declaration of the President of the IOC, Dr. Thomas Bach, to decide only on the basis of secure evidence.”
While the IOC’s Disciplinary Commission (also referred to as the Oswald Commission) has yet to release its full decision and explain how it arrived at the final rulings, cases for 26 other Russian athletes (four of which are nordic skiers) who allegedly doped in Sochi are still pending, the CBC reported.
“The Oswald Commission has announced that all hearings for active athletes who could qualify for the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 will be completed by the end of November,” the IOC stated.
As of Wednesday, exactly 100 days out from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, it remained unclear whether the commission obtained further evidence concerning Legkov and Belov beyond what was already presented to the CAS.
Wieschemann claims the commission ruled “without further investigation and without further evidence…”
“Denis Oswald still stated at the last summit of the IOC that his investigations would go far beyond those of Prof. Richard McLaren,” the firm’s press release stated. “Well that’s actually not the case. The investigation has only been limited to obtaining a new forensic opinion…”
And while some of the most outspoken individuals in the XC world continue to speak out, others are weighing in on social media as well.
“… It’s disturbing to find out that some athletes in cross-country skiing have likely doped, and have gone so long unpunished,” Caitlin Patterson of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project wrote on Facebook. “But it reminds me that we must be vigilant, keep looking for ways to support anti-doping testing programs, put pressure on governing bodies to take a stand for clean sport, educate ourselves on progress and pitfalls of the cause, and speak up when we can.
“I haven’t spoken much on this politicized topic, but recent news such as this disqualification makes me distinctly aware of how much I value clean sport and all it stands for,” Patterson, who has started 27 World Cup races, continued. “Thank you IOC for taking this step towards preserving clean sport! Let’s keep it going, keep the pressure on, and fight to #CompeteClean and #PlayTrue!”
Former U.S. skier Sylvan Ellefson, who retired in 2014 after racing 23 World Cups, took to Instagram: “Thankful that our @usnordicskiteam contingency all get to move up a couple spots, but I mostly feel for those who have always been moral in their decision making. Those who train and race relentlessly, with their head down, just to find out their competition is taking the easy road. I could go on, but nothing lights me up more than cheaters.”
Rosie Brennan on her way to 35th in the 10 k classic in Oberstdorf, Germany, as part of the 2016 Tour de Ski. Brennan is an athlete representative to U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and recently participated in a call between the leadership of the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, with 50 other athlete representatives. The athletes had the chance to ask questions about current doping investigations and anti-doping policy. (Photo: Marcel Hilger)
Other racers, too, have a big stake in the outcome. For them, whether FIS brings a case or not feels symbolic of whether action will ever be taken to resolve the allegations of years of systematic doping orchestrated by the Russian state.
FIS says that it is waiting on evidence from a commission which is part of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In an email to FasterSkier, Legkov’s lawyer, Christof Wieschemann, wrote that the IOC commission would have a hearing for his client on Monday.
“We’re getting really close and I haven’t heard anything [from FIS] yet,” said Rosie Brennan, a U.S. Ski Team member and athlete with the Alaska Pacific University elite team. “I guess that’s one of my biggest fears. It’s what is really going to tell us if the IOC chose to do more investigations just to drag things out. If FIS can’t make a decision by October 31st because these investigations aren’t finished, well, there we have our answer.”
As the controversy over systematic doping in Russia continues unresolved, athletes are becoming louder in demanding action.
Back in December, over 100 cross-country skiers signed a letter expressing frustration with the IOC for not being tougher on doping, and asking for a meeting with International Ski Federation (FIS) President Gian Franco Kasper. That meeting – where IOC President Thomas Bach was also present – happened in February at Nordic World Championships in Lahti, Finland.
Meanwhile in Germany, athletes feel that their representation within the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) was not meaningful and in order to make their actions more powerful, they may leave the organization and form their own union.
Against this backdrop, the leadership of the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) organized a conference call earlier this month with athlete representatives from different national and international sports federations around the world.
“It was actually a very last minute thing,” Brennan, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s cross-country athlete representative, said in an interview. “It was unclear whether that was intentional or not, but one way or the other, the U.S. Ski Team didn’t find out about the meeting until very last minute.”
In theory, the only American athletes on the call should have been athlete representatives to the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) or to international fedrations like FIS and the International Biathlon Union. (U.S. biathlete Lowell Bailey is one of that body’s representatives, and was on the call.)
But because the call was not well publicized, it turned out that the USOC representatives couldn’t participate. So Brennan did instead.
When she decided to become an athlete representative, she said, she wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that she would wind up on international conference calls with the likes of WADA Director General Olivier Niggli. Traditionally, U.S. Ski and Snowboard representatives – who come from sports as diverse as alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, and snowboarding – deal more with domestic issues.
But the doping scandal has had a huge effect on the cross-country ski community, and so she has been very engaged with the issue.
“I am the only cross-country athlete on the committee,” she said. “At each of our meetings we each give a sport-specific update, and last year a lot of my updates revolved around anti-doping because of everything that was happening. I was really excited because all the other members were super supportive and wanted to help fight for us, and work harder for clean sport. I was really encouraged by that, because a lot of those sports, I don’t think it’s really an issue for them… that was really encouraging and it made me want to do a little more on the anti-doping front.”
During the conference call, questions from the athletes to the IOC and WADA leadership just about doping took up more than an hour and a half.
The athletes made it clear that they continue to be skeptical of the IOC’s handling of the scandal. An independent investigation created by WADA presented findings in 2016 of widespread doping in Russia, including over 1,000 documents used as evidence. That investigation also did forensic testing of the glass bottles used to collect anti-doping samples, finding that some bottles belonging to Russian athletes at the 2014 Olympics had been tampered with.
The IOC convened two more commissions, headed by Denis Oswald and Samuel Schmid, to investigate the allegations further before taking disciplinary action against any athletes or against Russia as a country, for instance by barring Russian teams from competition.
“I think that was the biggest question we all still left with: Why are there two more investigations happening following the McLaren Report?” Brennan said, referring to the WADA independent investigation. “I think most athletes felt that the McLaren Report was very thorough and clear, and why there’s two more investigations happening just seems strange. I guess their answer was the McLauren Report didn’t look at all the sides well enough, and was never a report supposed to indict people. So they felt they needed to have these two follow-up investigations. But from an athlete perspective, I think that’s just a hard thing, because to me it feels like they’re dragging their feet a little bit in decisions.
“The other hard part is that Oswald is part of the IOC, so it doesn’t feel terribly independent to me,” she continued. “So I think we still all kind of left with those questions in mind.”
Brennan said that relatively little new information was presented to the athletes. Updates were given on the compliance of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), which is still not accredited to do doping tests within Russia without oversight from another agency.
In order to be deemed compliant, WADA has said that Russia must acknowledge and apologize for the doping offenses committed in the last years, and also open a storage room in the Moscow laboratory which could contain more evidence of doping. So far, the government has refused to do either, and the storage room of the laboratory remains locked.
“A lot of people are wondering why haven’t they been able to get access, and what in that lab is useful at this point,” Brennan said. “They were pretty honest in saying that they don’t think anything is going to be in that lab. Because that lab only kept samples for three months, and it’s been much more than three months now [since the time the allegations refer to] so the chances of anything still being in there are really slim… I was happy that they were so honest about that, but it was also a bummer to hear. It just seems like another example of them dragging their feet. They keep putting this out there as a reason [that the investigation isn’t finished], when it’s not a very good reason.”
Brennan was impressed to be part of this international community – according to the IOC, 51 athlete representatives were on the call – but also saw that the level of engagement and self-confidence to demand action were not evenly distributed around the group.
“Every question that was asked was a good one,” she said. “The frustrating part was that every person that talked was either Canadian or American, except for I think one Brit had a question… it just further made clear that athletes in other countries either are choosing not to read the information, or are not getting the information, or just simply… aren’t really willing to take that stance. That’s really hard because I feel it needs to be an international effort to see some significant change. I hope that those other international athletes that were on the call at least took in that information and saw what Americans and Canadians are really pushing for, and maybe fired them up a little bit to go home and get some support going.”
That’s the kind of change that the head of Brennan’s team thinks is necessary.
“I truly believe that if the athletes get together, work with some really smart people, decide how they would like it to work, make a worldwide demand for that – they have the control,” Tiger Shaw, the CEO of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, said in an interview last week. “It is still about them. You can’t have the competitions without them. They provide the commercial value for all of these contests.”
He sees athlete leaders as having a unique ability to make demands. It is one of the reasons that the U.S. is pushing for cross-country skier Kikkan Randall, who was previously the FIS athlete representative and helped make the meeting between skiers, IOC President Bach, and FIS President Kasper happen last year, to get elected as an IOC member at the upcoming Olympics in February.
“She has a track record already of being involved in governance and caring deeply about it, even while she’s competing, which is kind of rare,” Shaw said of Randall. “It’s a more critical position than ever [to be on] the IOC. It needs someone who can help push the IOC forward in all the ways it needs to reform its governance – a strong athlete voice there is going to be critical.”
Brennan, for one, recognizes that not all athletes are comfortable being that loud voice. Some may also simply not want to deal with this not-very-uplifting topic, even within their own minds, and instead focus on training and being the best they can be in competition.
“When I go out and train, it’s like the last thing I’m thinking about, so I guess I’ve been able to compartmentalize it pretty well,” Brennan laughed. “But I do feel a little bit torn when I try to communicate this information to my teammates and other U.S. skiers. I do know that some people prefer to just not pay attention to it and just focus on their training. The challenging part for me is that I want to be respectful of how my teammates to prepare for the season, but I also want them to have the information that’s out there. So I try to include some links so they can choose whether to click on them… I think it’s just one of the skills you have to learn as an athlete is how to compartmentalize those things and not let it affect your training. When you go to race, you go to race regardless of who is there and who’s not there.”
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