Montreal : The prospect of Russian and Kenyan athletes being barred from the Olympics gathered momentum as a tidal wave of doping sleaze engulfed both countries with just three months to go before the Rio Games.
Kenya was plunged into crisis after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ruled at a meeting in Montreal that the African nation’s drug-testing body had breached strict international rules.
The WADA declaration of non-compliance places a question mark against the participation of Kenyan athletes in Rio.
Rene Bouchard, Chairman of WADA’s compliance review committee (CRC), said Kenya’s drug testing agency was declared “non-compliant with immediate effect.” Russia’s anti-doping agency was declared non-compliant last year after a WADA independent committee uncovered evidence of a state-sponsored doping program which led to Russia’s suspension from international athletics.
Russian track and field athletes will be banned from Rio unless the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) lifts its suspension next month.
But even as WADA held its board meeting in Montreal, a fresh round of revelations about drugs at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi erupted in the New York Times.
The Times report quoted the former head of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory as saying that dozens of Russian athletes, including 15 medalists, were involved in a successful plot to evade drug-testers.
The laboratory director, Grigory Rodchenkov, detailed how athletes were given a three-drug cocktail of performance enhancing substances combined with alcohol to boost absorption.
Up to 100 tainted urine samples were replaced with clean ones collected months before, with samples passed through a hole in a lab wall at night.
“We were fully equipped, knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly prepared for Sochi like never before,” Rodchenkov was quoted by the Times as saying. “It was working like a Swiss watch.”
Russia topped the table in Sochi with 33 medals, including 13 Olympic titles.
