WADA has admitted that Richard McLaren’s 2016 report on the alleged use of doping by Russian athletes is “not sufficient to bring successful cases,” the International Olympic Committee said.
“At the recent meeting (21 February) held by WADA in Lausanne to ‘provide assistance to IFs [International Federations] regarding how to analyse and interpret the evidence,’ it was admitted by WADA that in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases,” Christophe De Kepper, director-general and member of the executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said in a letter to IOC.
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Based on the first part of McLaren’s report published on June 18, 2016, which presented the results of his investigation into alleged doping at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games, WADA recommended that the IOC, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), and all international sporting federations exclude Russia from their competitions. The entire team of Russian Paralympians was consequently banned from the Rio games.
The second part of the report, which came out on December 9, 2016, also claimed that over 1,000 Russian athletes participating in summer, winter, and Paralympic competitions had benefited from an alleged plot to conceal positive doping tests.
“In his first interim report, Professor McLaren describes a ‘state sponsored system,’ whilst in the final full report in December he described an ‘institutional conspiracy,’” De Kepper says in the letter.
The IOC will now have to consider “what this change means and which individuals, organizations or government authorities may have been involved.”
Now, WADA has told the international sports federations “to make direct contact with the IP [McLaren] team to try to obtain further information,” De Kepper’s letter reveals, adding “WADA also explained that the translations used by the IP team were not adequate and was obtaining official translations of some of the texts.”
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RT obtained evidence indicating that the IOC had not been satisfied with McLaren’s report earlier in February from a leak provided exclusively by the hacker group ‘Fancy Bears,’ which had uncovered documents showing that the IOC had posed over 50 questions about 16 of the accused to McLaren.
In the table mentioned by IOC Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Paquerette Girard Zappelli, almost every name is followed by the question “how to demonstrate,” meaning that the IOC apparently did not see direct proof of the person’s alleged involvement in the doping scandal.
The IOC also sought for more information on Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, upon whose claims McLaren based his report.
In January, Fancy Bears also leaked a letter from the former director of WADA’s accredited doping Laboratory of Lausanne, Martial Saugy, in which he accuses McLaren of making “incorrect allegations” claiming that his laboratory had intentionally destroyed urine samples of Russian sportsmen requested by WADA, as the report contends.
Saugy states that WADA itself never complained to the lab about the destruction of these samples, though McLaren’s report stated that the lab destroyed them after WADA had “specifically requested” them, according to LIFE News, which was the first to publish Saugy’s letter.
In January Christof Wieschemann, the lawyer defending Russian skiers Evgeny Belov and Aleksandr Legkov, slammed McLaren’s report, saying that doping records contain a significant number of inconsistencies that makes the identification of athletes questionable.
“If you are familiar with the McLaren report… you know that different documents are available, which refer to the athletes. I compared all of them. And these documents are not consistent,” he told RT.
