Dozens of Russian athletes who competed at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, including at least 15 medal winners, were part of a “state-run doping program,” The New York Times has reported.
In a report published on May 12, the newspaper quoted the director of Russia’s antidoping laboratory at the time, Grigory Rodchenkov, as saying he developed a cocktail of banned substances that he provided to the athletes.
Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence services secretly replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, The Times quotes Rodchenkov as saying.
Rodchenkov, who now lives in Los Angeles, estimated that as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged by the end of the games.
TASS news agency quoted Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko as calling the allegations as “nonsense.”
"These allegations are very detailed and very worrying, and we ask the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate immediately," said a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee.
The report is the latest alleging widespread performance-enhancing drug use by Russian athletes.
Russia was banned from international athletics competitions following revelations in November of widespread state-sponsored doping.
