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TSN Senior Correspondent

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Athletes who competed at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were cheated out of medals thanks to a state-sanctioned doping program managed by the Russian secret service, according to a report released on Monday by an independent investigator.

Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer hired by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), concluded in his report that Russia’s FSB, the successor to the KGB, managed a systematic doping program that manipulated athlete’s urine samples by swapping out the positive samples of Russian athletes who were cheating for clean samples.

“The Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation,” McLaren said at a news conference on Monday in Toronto. “I am unwaveringly confident in our report.”

The Russian track and field team has already been banned from competing at the Rio Olympics. The report will intensify calls for the remaining of Russia’s Olympic team to also be barred from competing in Brazil.

McLaren said his investigators had confirmed a number of allegations made in May by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the anti-doping lab in Moscow. Rodchenkov described to ‘60 Minutes’ and The New York Times a doping program reminiscent of a Cold War novel.
Westhead: Russian doping scandal extremely widespread

TSN Senior Correspondent Rick Westhead joins Gareth Wheeler and Mark Roe in-studio on Game Day to discuss the Russian doping scandal.

Rodchenkov said Russian anti-doping experts and members of the FSB intelligence service, who were disguised as maintenance workers in the lab, covertly replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier.

Each night during the Sochi Olympic Games, Russian anti-doping agency workers passed bottles of urine through a “mouse-hole” in the wall. FSB workers on the other side, matching numbers on the sample bottles to photographs athletes took during their tests, swapped out the dirty urine for clean.

McLaren said he had confirmed Rodchenkov’s allegations and said that his own researchers found a method to break into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the used at many international competitions.

McLaren’s investigative team had two-months to conclude their work. He said that he received intelligence as recently as this past Friday that could not be incorporated into his report due to timing.

It is unclear at this point exactly how many would-be medallists were cheated out of a podium result at Sochi.

McLaren said Russia’s cheating also took place at the 2013 IAAF World Championships in Moscow and the 2015 FINA World Aquatics Championships held in Kazan.

McLaren said his team found evidence that positive drug tests from 139 competitors in athletics between 2011 and 2015 were made to disappear. The positive drug tests of 14 hockey players also vanished, according to the McLaren report.

International Ice Hockey Federation spokesman Adam Steiss said between 2011 and 2015, Russia hosted four major international hockey tournaments: the 2011 Under-18 Women’s World Championship in Dmitrov; the 2013 World Junior Championship in Ufa; the 2013 Under-18 Men’s World Championship in Sochi; and the Olympic Games in Sochi in February 2014.

Steiss said the IIHF was reviewing McLaren’s report.

McLaren does not name athletes who tested positive because that was not part of McLaren’s mandate, he said.

Russian sports officials first dismissed Rodchenkov’s allegations as “groundless,” calling him “a turncoat.”

But following the immediate aftermath, Russian officials tried to manage the crisis.

The Russian government hired Burson-Marsteller, a New York-based public relations firm that specializes in defending the reputations of controversial clients, such as the Philip Morris Tobacco Company.

On May 15, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko wrote an op-ed for Britain’s Sunday Times entitled, “Russia is sorry and has cleaned up its act. Please let us compete in Rio.”