2nd McLaren Report Alleges Russian Doping Program Continued Post-Sochi

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released the second part of the independent McLaren Report today, which alleged that over 1000 Russian athletes benefited from a state-sponsored doping program that evolved from at least the 2012 London Summer Olympics and extended beyond the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

The full 151-page report is here, courtesy of WADA. It’s a follow-up to the first McLaren Report, which came out last July, just before the start of the Rio Olympics. The report bears the name of Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, who was commissioned by WADA to investigate allegations of a state-sponsored doping program in Russian athletics.

Those allegations go back at least to 2014, when a German documentary accused Russia of hiding a massive systemic doping program. The documentary focused specifically on athletics (track & field), and WADA’s first Independent Commission Report in the fall of 2015 investigated only that sport. McLaren’s first report in July indicated that Russia had been tampering with samples at the WADA anti-doping lab in Moscow – often swapping out samples for selected athletes or manipulating test results to hide positive doping tests.

The second report continues to back all of those claims, saying that over 1000 Russian athletes “can be identified as being involved or benefiting from manipulations to conceal positive tests.” The report says athletes from both Summer and Winter Olympics are among those 1000.

The report also lists the events in which the alleged manipulation of the doping control process was in effect. The London 2012 Olympics, 2013 World University Games, 2013 World Athletics Championships and 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were all named on that list. The report also goes on to say that the swapping of urine samples for Russian athletes “did not stop at the close of the winter Olympics,” and that the manipulation “became a regular monthly practice of the Moscow Laboratory in dealing with elite summer and winter athletes,” citing DNA testing as proving the alleged cheating happened.

A few other notes, per The Guardian‘s analysis of the report: Vitaly Mutko, who was the Russian Minister for Sport and is now the deputy prime minister, is not directly proven to have known about the doping program, but is implicated because of how heavily his department was allegedly involved. Vladimir Putin is not accused of anything in the report. The Guardian also reports that Russian officials would add salt and bits of Necafe coffee to clean samples to make them match dirty samples and confuse analysis of the dirty samples.