Russia makes major demand on Olympic doping retests
MOSCOW -- Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko wants all retested doping samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics to be thrown out because of alleged flaws in the reanalysis process.
"A laboratory which falsely declared a positive test result must be stripped of its accreditation and all the samples it tested must be declared invalid," Mutko told Russia's Tass news agency on Wednesday.
The IOC has reported 55 positive findings in retesting of stored samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics. The Russian Olympic Committee has said 22 of the cases involved Russian athletes, including medalists.
Russian officials said two of the athletes were cleared when their "B'' samples tested negative, contradicting the positive "A'' samples.
Mutko said those two cases were enough justification for the entire retesting program to be scrapped.
Russian state sports channel Match TV previously reported that 10 Russian medalists had tested positive in retests from Beijing alone. One of those athletes, bronze medal-winning race walker Denis Nizhegorodov, was later reported as having a negative "B'' sample, along with rower Alexander Kornilov.
The IOC has been retesting samples at the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland. The tests are targeted on athletes hoping to compete at the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Calls to keep the Russians out of Rio have grown following allegations, including claims by the former director of Moscow's drug-testing lab that he doped Russian athletes and helped to switch tainted samples for clean ones at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. WADA has launched an independent probe into those allegations, which were reported by CBS' "60 Minutes."
CBS News has learned from the lab's former director that any positive drug tests from the Sochi Games disappeared a long time ago.
Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov shared details of a systematic cover-up in Sochi during Skype conversations with Vitaly Stepanov, a former Russian anti-doping official turned key whistleblower.
Stepanov allowed CBS' "60 Minutes" to listen to 15 hours of conversations he secretly recorded with Rodchenkov.
In the recordings, Rodchenkov named Russian gold medalists in three sports -- bobsled, skeleton and cross-country skiing -- whose dirty drug tests he helped cover up, "60 Minutes Sports" correspondent Armen Keteyian reports. It was all part, Rodchenkov said, of an elaborate scheme to protect Russia's Olympic medal winners, with the help of his country's intelligence service, known as the FSB.
The FSB figured out a way to open bottles considered to be tamper-proof containing urine from drug-tainted athletes, Keteyian reports. Then they filled the bottles with clean urine collected from athletes before they started doping.
Rodchenkov said he then had two weeks after the Sochi Games to make sure, in his words, people turned out to be clean before test samples were sent to the International Olympic Committee in Switzerland for storage, Keteyian reports.
Also Wednesday, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin strongly denied allegations that Mutko might be personally involved in covering up doping cases.
A documentary by Germany's ARD to be broadcast later Wednesday alleges it has evidence that Mutko intervened to bury a leading soccer player's positive test, and that it also has video footage of banned coaches working with elite athletes.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia is committed to working with international bodies to battle doping but added that "until there is hard evidence to back up those claims (against Mutko) ... we will treat this as libel."
Russia's state Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case against unnamed former officials from the country's track and field federation.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said in a statement that the case focused on a charge of "abuse of authority" by the officials and claimed it was tied to a criminal investigation in France into alleged extortion of athletes by former IAAF president Lamine Diack and other officials.
"If a crime is found to have been committed, then the guilty parties will doubtless receive criminal punishment under the full extent of the law," Markin said.