The New York Times published an article Thursday detailing the spectacular alleged attempts to ensure Russian athletes could keep taking steroids through the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The report states that at least 15 medal-winning athletes were involved in a complex government-backed effort to ensure their steroid use could go undetected.
The 5 wildest details from the New York Times’ report on Russia’s Olympic steroid program
If this story is true, Russia deserves a gold medal for Olympic cheating.
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The report centers around interviews with Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the lab where athletes were tested. Rodchenkov was employed by the Russian government and was in on the scheme. He has since fled Russia for his own safety and spilled all the secrets. Nobody can confirm that what Rodchenkov says is true, but it all checks out with a report published last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency. His detailed allegations make it seem fairly certain that the Russian government played a large role in promoting and concealing steroid use by its athletes to ensure a positive performance in Sochi.
This article is not a substitute for the Times article. Go read it! Go read it right now! These are just the most fascinating things in an in-depth description of a state-run steroid program. It’s interesting to see the lengths a government will go to in order to ensure its athletes perform well on the world stage, particularly with another set of games a few months away.
1. The anti-doping agency was actually the doping agency
How do you conceal steroid use? Easy: Just run it through the organization in charge of preventing steroid use!
Rodchenkov not only ran the lab responsible for testing all athletes’ urine, he was also the person who came up with the steroid combination given to Russian athletes. He was even involved in dumping out bottles of tainted urine. This is like in movies when the rat in an agency is put in charge of the committee to find the rat. It actually happens in real life, too!
2. This was a very complex pee operation
Most doping programs apparently end well before the competition in question. What happened here that’s different is athletes continued doping up until the event, because Russia’s knowledge and access of the anti-doping facility allowed them to dispose of dirty urine and replace it with clean urine. Which they did in the middle of the night during the Olympics:
The sealed B bottles were handed over to the man Dr. Rodchenkov believed was a Russian intelligence officer, who would take them to an adjacent building. Within hours, Dr. Rodchenkov said, the bottles were returned to the storage room, their caps unlocked.
That man also supplied clean urine, collected from each of the athletes months prior to the Olympics, before they started doping, Dr. Rodchenkov said. It was delivered in soda bottles, baby formula bottles and other miscellaneous containers, he said.
Making sure to keep the overhead light off, Dr. Rodchenkov and a colleague dumped the tainted urine into a nearby toilet, washed out the bottles, dried them with filter paper and filled them with the clean urine.
3. They had to hack an unhackable bottle
There are serious precautions to make sure athletes’ pee-bottles don’t get broken into. Well, guess what!
It was around that time, he said, that a man he came to believe was working for the Russian internal intelligence service, the F.S.B., began showing up at the lab in Moscow, inquiring about the bottles used for storing the urine samples tested for banned substances...The man took a particular interest in the toothed metal rings that lock the bottles when the cap is twisted shut. He collected hundreds of them, Dr. Rodchenkov said... “When I first time saw that bottle is open, I did not believe my eyes,” he said, adding: “I truly believed this was tamper proof.”
4. It took booze to make this happen
The athletes were given a literal cocktail of steroids:
To speed up absorption of the steroids and shorten the detection window, he dissolved the drugs in alcohol — Chivas whiskey for men, Martini vermouth for women.
Come on, Russia. No vodka?
Yes, the alcohol was decided by gender. You can’t let a woman drink an unladylike alcohol while pumping her body with anabolic steroids.
5. Two of the people who worked on this happened to die when things went sour
After the report came out, Dr. Rodchenkov said, Russian officials forced him to resign. Fearing for his safety, he moved to Los Angeles... back in Russia, two of Dr. Rodchenkov's close colleagues died unexpectedly in February, within weeks of each other; both were former antidoping officials, one who resigned soon after Dr. Rodchenkov fled the country.
In February, the anti-doping agency’s founding chairman, Vyacheslav Sinev, died of causes that were not made public. Two weeks later, Nikita Kamayev, the agency’s ex-head, died of a heart attack, although he had no known history of heart problems.
For the record, we are not saying the sudden deaths of Mr. Sinev and Mr. Kamayev are linked to a Russian government attempt to suppress potential blowback on the doping scandal. There is no way to know for certain whether their conveniently timed deaths were surreptitiously caused by a government known for occasionally surreptitiously causing the deaths of people it does not like. Please do not consider this paragraph to be an allegation of any secret government murders.
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