Conspiracy to get Russia banned from the Rio Games

[bennythedip2]

Russian doping 'state-directed' - - (July 18 2016)

The WADA-funded report, prepared by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, has revealed the Russian Sports Ministry controlled a cynical scheme to cheat at numerous sporting events, including London 2012 and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

WADA's executive committee met immediately after McLaren's report was published and has called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) "to consider, under their respective charters, to decline entries for Rio 2016 of all athletes" submitted by the Russian authorities.

WADA president Sir Craig Reedie reacted to McLaren's findings with something close to horror, such is the scale and scope of a doping conspiracy that helped Russian athletes from more than 30 sports dope with impunity for years.

"As the international agency - responsible for leading the collaborative, global, clean sport movement - WADA is calling on the sports movement to impose the strongest possible measures to protect clean sport for Rio 2016 and beyond," said Reedie, who is also an IOC vice-president.

IOC president Thomas Bach, previously reluctant to impose any collective punishments on Russia, issued a statement to say he wants to study McLaren's 103-page report carefully before making any decisions but he has already called for an urgent meeting of his executive board on Tuesday.

"The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games," Bach added.

"Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated."

Sir Philip Craven, Bach's counterpart at the IPC, said: "We are truly shocked, appalled and deeply saddened at the extent of the state-sponsored doping programme implemented in Russia.

"The findings of the McLaren report mark a very dark day for sport."

Even before the report was published, several anti-doping agencies and athletes' groups had lined up to demand that Russia be banned from the Rio Games, pointing out that the executive boards of the IOC and IPC have the power to do so in their rulebooks.

With the Russian Olympic Committee already appealing against an earlier decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to maintain the ban on Russia's track and field team that has been in place since November, it is likely the IOC and IPC will wait until the Court of Arbitration for Sport has made its ruling later this week.

But any hopes the Russian authorities have of winning that appeal have surely disappeared in much the same way positive samples vanished at the anti-doping laboratories in Moscow and Sochi.

WADA's executive committee has made six other recommendations apart from the request to withdraw the invitations to compete in Rio.

They include banning Russian government officials from all international sports events, maintaining the suspensions of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory and Russian anti-doping agency, and asking the international federations of the sports mentioned in McLaren's report to consider following the IAAF lead by banning the respective Russian governing body.

It has also called on football's world governing FIFA to investigate Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko's involvement in the elaborate doping scam, as Mutko is also the president of the Russian FA, a member of FIFA's council and the chairman of the organising committee for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

His deputy Yuri Nagornykh, appointed by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2010, is described by McLaren as the doping programme's main decision-maker but the report also implicates Mutko's closest anti-doping advisor Natalia Zhelanova, says it was "inconceivable" that Mutko was unaware of what was going on and even says he personally intervened to cover up a foreign footballer's positive test.

WADA's final recommendation arguably outlines just how bad Russia's cheating has been in that it calls for McLaren and his team of investigators to be given more time to complete their work: what he has found already is based on just 57 "intense" days.

McLaren, who also worked on last year's WADA-funded commission that looked into doping in Russian athletics, was asked to build on that investigation after the New York Times printed a remarkable interview in May with the former director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov.

Now in hiding in the United States, Rodchenkov said Russia's poor performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics and difficulties in circumventing the biological-passport anti-doping system had effectively persuaded the Russian government to double down on what has already widespread cheating.

Rodchenkov said, under direct control from the Russian Sports Ministry, he worked out a new cocktail of steroids to give Russian athletes and established a system to cover up positive samples at the Moscow laboratory.

This operation, which McLaren refers to in his report as the "disappearing positive methodology", worked perfectly in the build-up to London 2012, the World Athletics Championships in Moscow in 2013, World Swimming Championships in Kazan in 2015 and other major events.

Rodchenkov, who fled Russia in fear for his life following his sacking in November, was interviewed by McLaren via Skype, to protect his safety, and supplied him with hundreds of emails and electronic messages to corroborate his claims.

McLaren also received help from other anonymous witnesses and used cyber and forensic analysis to give what he called "unswerving confidence" that his findings were "beyond reasonable doubt".

But the most shocking of Rodchenkov's original claims related to Russia taking advantage of its host status at the Winter Olympics by coming up with a plan to allow its athletes to dope under the noses of international observers.

Russia's secret service, the FSB, had worked out how to open and reseal the supposedly tamper-proof bottles in which urine samples are stored and transported - McLaren said this was the "fundamental building block" of the "sample swapping methodology" that allowed Russia to win a record 33 medals in Sochi.

The rest of the plan involved smuggling Russian samples out of the Sochi laboratory through a hole in the wall, an FSB agent taking the caps of the bottles off and Rodchenkov refilling them with urine supplied by the athletes when they knew they were clean.

McLaren was able to corroborate this by sending a selection of stored samples to the laboratory at King's College London, where a forensic expert was able to detect scratch marks around the necks of the bottles that proved they had been opened.

The report is full of such details, painting a picture of a sporting culture unable or unwilling to accept that athletes can compete clean, and sports officials completely shameless in their lip service to international anti-doping rules.

Putin issued a statement via the official news agency TASS mixing acceptance, defiance and denial, claiming the report is based on "the testimony of one man with a scandalous reputation" and questioned whether McLaren's findings can be "weighty and trustworthy".

He also suggested sport is returning to the Cold War era of "political interference" in sport and hinted that a 1980s-style boycott cannot be completely ruled out.

But he did say the officials directly named in the report would be provisionally suspended pending a Russian investigation into the report's findings.

That sounds ominous for several senior figures within Russian sport, the secret service and Russian Sports Ministry - but the world's biggest country now knows it has been exposed as a very bad sport and radical changes are required if it is to be allowed to compete at major events, let alone continue to host them.

(Bennys Veiw)
So like politicians aren't corrupt, or FIFA ? What about the Corporations and Federal and Central banks ?
Oh and please don't get me started about Tony Blair or Hilary Clinton
Like Putin says, Quote "the report is based on "the testimony of one man with a scandalous reputation" and questioned whether McLaren's findings can be "weighty and trustworthy".- UnQuote

[bennythedip2]

Russia loses Rio appeal - (July 21 2016)

Russia has lost its appeal against the decision to ban its athletics team from the Rio Olympics.

The Russian Olympic Committee and 68 individual athletes lodged an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport - sport's highest court - when athletics' world governing body the IAAF upheld a global competition ban against the Russian athletics federation that has been in place since November.

That sanction was imposed after a damning World Anti-Doping Agency report into widespread doping in Russian track and field.

A second WADA-backed investigation has now revealed that a similar doping programme extended to almost all Olympic and Paralympic sports in Russia.

Earlier this week, WADA and others asked the International Olympic Committee and International Paralympic Committee to ban Russia entirely from the Rio Games, but both bodies said they needed more time to consider their options.

The IAAF responded to CAS's decision by stating their decision to support the ban would ensure a "level playing field for athletes".

"While we are thankful that our rules and our power to uphold our rules and the anti-doping code have been supported, this is not a day for triumphant statements," IAAF President Sebastian Coe said in a statement on the IAAF's official website.

"I didn't come into this sport to stop athletes from competing. It is our federation's instinctive desire to include, not exclude.

"Beyond Rio the IAAF Taskforce will continue to work with Russia to establish a clean safe environment for its athletes so that its federation and team can return to international recognition and competition."

[bennythedip2]

At Cornell University they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the Tunneling Electron Microscope.

This microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe.

If I were using that microscope right now, I still wouldn't be able to locate my interest in the Olympics.