Russian athletes are allowed to participate in events as neutral persons, unless WADA can prove a connection with the doping program, in which agents of the Russian state security apparatus were involved at its height, who replaced spoiled doping test samples with clean ones during the middle of the year. Night-time operation at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Russia hosted these games in Sochi, a coastal town that has been rebuilt at great expense to project the country’s sporting and economic power.
The plan, which had begun years earlier, only came to light after one of its chief architects, Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of a Moscow doping laboratory at the heart of the scandal, revealed what had happened.
Rodchenkov, who now lives in an undisclosed location in the United States, revealed how hundreds of tainted anti-doping results were tampered with before being put on official records. It protected the athletes from identification and enabled them to benefit from chemically enhanced benefits before heading to major championship events.
Anti-doping investigators later recommended a four-year ban after discovering that Russian officials fabricated evidence and tampered with the contents of a drug testing database in order to discredit Rodchenkov and further cover up his behavior. At a meeting last December, the WADA board of directors approved the recommendation and imposed the ban.
Until the global sanction of WADA was imposed, the penalties against Russian sports and officials were sporadically and largely left to the governing bodies of the individual sports. World Athletics, the governing body of athletics, has long taken the toughest line, with a ban that has kept Russia in the sporting wilderness for nearly five years.
In contrast, the International Olympic Committee was reluctant to act broader with its President Thomas Bach, saying repeatedly that it was against collective punishment of Russian athletes. This led to the strange sight of Russia pitching one of its largest teams at the 2018 Winter Olympics, where IOC’s punishment was largely limited to Russian symbols, including the uniform, team name and anthem.
