Russia doping: IOC to consider Rio 2016 blanket ban after report confirms widespread systematic doping

The report confirms allegations first made in The New York Times' exposé in May

Olympic and Russian flags at 2014 Winter Games in Sochi (Getty)

The International Olympic Committee is under immense pressure to ban all Russian athletes from competing at the Rio Olympics after a devastating investigative report found that the country’s government, security services and sporting authorities colluded to hide systematic doping across “a vast majority” of winter and summer sports.

The report, published by the respected Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, found that Russia’s humiliation after a poor medals return at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics led it to a campaign of state-sponsored cheating at the Sochi Games, four years later. It perpetrated the same cover-up in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympics, the 2013 World Championships in Moscow and the World University Games in Kazan in the same year, McLaren revealed.

The IOC could not confirm to The Independent last night that a simple majority vote on the organisation’s 15-strong executive board – which will discuss the McLaren report by teleconference on Tuesday - would be enough to see the entire Russian delegation thrown out of the Olympics, which start in three weeks. The board’s influential president, German Thomas Bach, may fall short of demanding Russia are excluded from Brazil, having been broadly supportive of Russian calls to focus on individual wrongdoers, as opposed to making collective punishments.

At least one other IOC executive member, Irish former judo competitor and European Olympic Committee Pat Hickey, has attacked the United States and Canada for calling on a blanket ban on Russia at Rio, claiming that their demands had pre-judged McLaren’s findings. Hickey has a long-standing relationship with Russia and was instrumental in its former state Azerbaijan being awarded the 2015 European Games, despite a dire human rights record.

In a sign of how Russia have friends in many places the International Swimming Federation (Fina) have also criticised the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports (CCES) for allegedly leaking McLaren’s findings.

The IOC is certainly well within its rights to support the outright ban on Russians which the World Anti-doping Agency (Wada) insisted on Monday that it now wants to see. At least three of the Olympic charters – 8, 27 and 59.1.4 – appear to support such action. The Scottish IOC board member Sir Craig Reedie, a former British Olympic Committee chairman and current Wada president, will certainly urge his colleagues to take that course of action on Tuesday.

The biographies of other board members, such as the Swiss Rene Fasel, Swede Gunilla Lindberg and Ukrainian Sergey Bubkar, all point towards them demanding the Russians be barred from all sports. But in practice, the 15-strong executive committee is not accustomed to voting on controversial decisions. Votes tend to be agreed by consensus. Voting numbers and individual decisions are rarely made known.

The McLaren report's key findings

• The Moscow Laboratory operated, for the protection of doped Russian athletes, within a State-dictated failsafe system, described in the report as the Disappearing Positive Methodology.
• The Sochi Laboratory operated a unique sample swapping methodology to enable doped Russian athletes to compete at the Games.
• The Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athletes' analytical results or sample swapping, with the active participation and assistance of the FSB (the Russian federal security service), CSP, and both Moscow and Sochi Laboratories.

One option might be for a blanket ban to be imposed on Russia but for Russians to be allowed to bypass it by making appeals on an “exceptional basis” to participate as “neutral athletes” – on the basis that they train outside of the Russian Federation. That would leave a very small Russian presence.

Publicly, Bach said that the IOC would not hesitate to take “the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated" after the McLaren report. That report supported the claims by Dr Grigor Rodchenkov, the head of the Moscow laboratory between 2005 and 2015, that urine samples which would have revealed steroid doping were substituted with clean ones with the help of Russia’s intelligence and anti-doping officials, to enable athletes to pass doping tests.

Richard McLaren (left) released a report to confirm state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Winter Olympics (Getty)

McLaren found that Russian athletes had benefited from what he called “the Disappearing Positive Methodology” which had become state policy after the country had a catastrophic Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. Complicit in the cover up were the Russian Sports Ministry, the Russian Security Service the FSB, and the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia (CSP). So was the deputy minister of sport, Yuri Nagornykh, who was appointed in 2010 by president Vladimir Putin.

It emerged last month that the chairs of the IOC Athletes’ Commission and the Wada athletes’ committee, Claudia Bokel and Beckie Scott, representing the views of thousands of athletes across the world, had written to Bach and Reedie warning them they were “shattering the confidence” of athletes because they had failed to do enough to tackle doping, particularly with Russia.

McLaren refused to say whether his findings should lead to Russia being banned from the Olympics in Rio which begin next month. “My mandate was to establish facts not to make recommendations,” he said.

UK sports minister Tracey Crouch also fell short of demanding a total Russia ban. “Everyone has a responsibility to support this process for the sake of clean and honest athletes,” she said “Professor McLaren’s report has exposed the extreme lengths some will go to in order to cheat.”