Eshould come in ship. This is how Grigory Rodchenkov tells it. London’s “Mail on Sunday” has published excerpts from the book of the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory and today’s key witness of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, which will be published in a few days.
The ship, Rodchenkow writes, was to anchor off the California coast and, thanks to the on-board doping laboratory, was to ensure that Soviet athletes had no problems with the refined controls at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But the Americans refused to anchor. This caused the barrel to overflow: The Soviets then had to opt for the boycott of the games, to which all states of the Warsaw Pact with the exception of Romania had joined.
What sounds like the perfect plot of a thriller among Cold War warriors was a reality four years later. In 1989, in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev brought Glasnost and Perestrojka, reported the magazine “Smena”, a KGB-controlled ship that was off the coast of South Korea in the autumn of 1988 during the Seoul Games, had a laboratory on board. For the reasons that Rodchenkov now calls.
A company that would not have been possible without the working people from the far west of their own sphere of rule and that was provided with a pinch of irony: Incheon was anchored by the river cruiser “Michail Scholochow”, built by VEB Elbe shipyard Boizenburg, named after that controversial as well as line-true winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Well-known and new details of the decades-long sporting confrontation between East and West provide material again and again: Evidence of the genesis of the fraud, explain why sport, why Olympic is a test field, for example, as the “Mail on Sunday” also just reported , at the British before the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Doping was never a local phenomenon, never restricted to an ideology.
And yet the global scale of the fraud history can only be estimated if one day the archives of the secret services, especially the files in Moscow, become accessible. There, not only, the wind has long been changing in this regard. It is only known, in broad outline, how the story continued: towards the Russian state doping for and in Sochi 2014 and the subsequent attempts to cover it up. Incidentally, the statistically cleanest games in Olympic history were those of Moscow in 1980. Number of dopers transferred to the Moscow laboratory at the time: zero. Funny? No way. The human suffering produced by the doping culture of top-class sport is too great.
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