SECRET AGENTS, a drug cocktail called the “Duchess”, baby bottles and instant coffee.
These were the ingredients of Russia’s doping conspiracy that read like a cross between a James Bond film and a screwball comedy.
But there is nothing funny about the way Russia corrupted London 2012.
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And the lessons Russia learned from London helped it refine its systematic cheating for their own Winter Games in Sochi in 2014.
It is believed Russia’s failure at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — and the potential humiliation if it was repeated on home soil — prompted the creation of a state-sponsored doping programme for the 21st century.
Their existing programme had involved coaches giving athletes drugs and corrupt doping control officers ensuring they gave warning about tests or allowed clean samples to be collected from the athlete or someone else entirely.
By 2011 Russia also had a last resort if all that failed — the Ministry of Sport oversaw a centralised Disappearing Positive Methodology, which involved recording tests as negative when they had in fact been positive or not recording them at all.
But the plan was not yet flawless. That was why Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, the man in charge of Moscow’s anti-doping lab — and later the whistleblower — found himself mixing urine with coffee shortly after London 2012.
The World Anti-Doping Agency had ordered 67 targeted samples which had been collected from Russian athletes between May and July 2012 to be sent to Switzerland for re-testing.
That was even though the Moscow lab had recorded them all as clean on the official global database.
The problem was Rodchenkov knew samples from at least 10 athletes on the list had in fact tested positive.
Worse still, the lab’s illegal store of clean urine had deposits for only eight of those athletes.
So Rodchenkov replaced eight “dirty” A samples with clean urine.
As Dr Richard McLaren’s second report described: “He altered this clean urine by diluting with water or adding salt, sediment or Nescafe coffee granules to match the specific gravity and appearance of the dirty B samples.”
But even those bizarre lengths to cover the use of performance-enhancing drugs would not guarantee the guilty athletes escaped detection.
Every doping control is supposed to involve the taking of two quantities of urine. The A sample, which is opened and tested, and a B sample, which remains sealed unless it is tested to corroborate a positive A sample.
And urine in the B samples could not be swapped without the tell-tale breaking of the seal.
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With the World Athletics Championships due to be staged in Moscow in 2013 and the Winter Olympics in Sochi the following February, there was a real risk of WADA stepping up its scrutiny of Russian athletes and getting its hands on dirty B samples.
As McClaren says: “The answer became clear. There was a pressing need for both A and B bottles to be swapped at the same time.”
The task of finding a way of opening and resealing B samples was given to the FSB — the secret police force that succeeded the KGB in Russia.
And Rodchenkov described the tools used to the investigators and a forensic expert concluded they came up with thin strips of metal, flexible yet strong enough to do the job.
That was not the only lesson learned after London 2012.
Not a single Russian athlete in London tested positive — during the Games at least.
Why? Mainly because Rodchenkov’s new cocktail of steroids, the “Duchess”, had been road-tested.
Athletes from track, field and weightlifting — and probably many other sports — took part in weekly “washout testing” to make sure they were on the new drug regime and not taking anything which would show up in London.
The only trouble was the Russian practice of collecting such samples in official containers which could be traced and whose absence would have to be explained.
So in the build-up to Sochi, McLaren (far left) says, “unofficial containers like Coke and baby bottles” were used instead.
The new and improved system of doping was itself tested at the Universiade Games in Kazan in July 2013 and then at August’s World Athletics Championships in Moscow. And so to Sochi.
McLaren says: “This is where the Russians moved from uncontrolled chaos to an institutionalized, disciplined medal-winning strategy and conspiracy.”
What the world saw was Russia topping the medals table with 13 golds, 11 silvers and nine bronzes.
Behind the scenes, the finely-honed system did its work.
Athletes taking “Duchess” were on a protected list and clean samples of their urine had been transported to Sochi.
And FSB agents, dubbed “the magicians” by McLaren, were in overdrive, swapping dirty urine for clean by passing the bottles back and forth through the “mouse hole” which led to their operations room inside the on-site laboratory’s secure compound.
The system worked so well in Sochi the “magicians” met regularly until the end of 2014 to carry on swapping Russian athletes’ samples.
If Rodchenkov had not confessed to the New York Times this year, nobody may ever have known the full truth.
And after Russia’s state- sponsored cheating, nobody can ever feel the same again about London 2012, the Olympics or sport.
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