Russian government officials engineered the drug-fueled corruption of nearly 30 Olympic sports, an investigator found, prompting the World Anti-Doping Agency to call for a ban of the country's entire team from the Rio Games.
The scheme lasted at least four years, covered 28 Olympic sports — both summer and winter — and involved at least 312 positive tests that went unreported at the behest of higher-ups in the country's sports ministry, according to a 97-page report issued on Monday.
"A mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government,'" said Travis Tygart, the CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency.
WADA, which hired arbitrator Richard Mclaren to lead the investigation, called on the IOC to decline entries of all Russian athletes to this summer's Olympics.
"In the face of such evidence of state-sponsored subversion of anti-doping processes, WADA insists upon imposition of the most serious consequences to protect clean athletes from the scourge of doping in sport," said WADA President Craig Reedie, who is also an IOC member.
Mclaren's report said allegations made by Moscow's former anti-doping lab director about sample switching at the Sochi Olympics went much as described in a New York Times story in May. That program involved dark-of-night bottle tampering in order to switch dirty samples with clean ones; it prevented Russian athletes, including more than a dozen medal winners, from testing positive. But Mclaren said the bottle tampering in Sochi was a one-shot deal. Meanwhile, he described tactics he labeled "disappearing positive methodology" that began in 2011, shortly after Russia's disappointing performance at the Vancouver Olympics. It included the 2013 track world championships in Moscow and was in place as recently as the 2015 swimming world championships in Kazan — when everyone in Russiansports knew they were under the doping microscope.
Mclaren said out of 577 positive sample screenings, 312 positive results were held back — or labeled "Save" by the lab workers — but that was only a "small slice" of the data that could have been examined.