Officials admit to doping ‘conspiracy’ in Russia: report

According to a report in The New York Times, Russia's anti-doping officials have admitted to a large-scale doping conspiracy in their country, but did not acknowledge the state's participation in it.

Russia's sports minister Vitaly Mutko has continued to deny the involvement of the Russian state in any doping conspiracy.

Russian anti-doping officials have for the first time acknowledged a massive doping conspiracy in their country that has rocked world sport, the New York Times has reported.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national anti-doping agency, told the newspaper in an article datelined from Moscow on Tuesday. However, Antseliovich and others interviewed continued to reject the characterisation of the doping scheme as “state-sponsored,” telling the Times that top government officials were not involved.

Investigator Richard McLaren said in a new report for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) this month that > more than 1,000 Russian athletes in some 30 sports took part in a plan for Moscow sports ministry officials to use banned drugs at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the 2012 London Summer Games and other global events.

Defiant

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko told TASS news agency on December 9, when the report was released, that claims of an “institutional conspiracy” had not been proved.

The allegations dealt the latest body blow to Russian sport, which was still trying to shrug off the damage from McLaren’s initial report and the exclusion of its track and field athletes from international competition.

The affair reverberated through the 2016 Rio Olympics and has continued to be felt as winter sports events such as biathlon and speed skating World Cup stops have been withdrawn from the country.