Beckie Scott, a two-time Winter Olympic medallist in cross-country skiing and chair of WADA’s athletes’ commission, said the time had come to act and ban Russia from this summer’s Games.
“Clean athletes’ rights to a level playing field need to be protected by those who govern sport,” she said.
In an interview with the New York Times, Rodchenkov, who claims he destroyed 1,417 drug samples over the course of one weekend, laid bare in damning detail the level of alleged cheating in Sochi.
He said he perfected a three-drug cocktail of anabolic steroids which he gave to athletes, claiming the same thing was done in the build-up to London 2012. During the Sochi Games, Rodchenkov claimed he and fellow Russian anti-doping officials and members of the Russian intelligence service would replace supposedly tamper-free urine samples tainted with performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier.
The IOC has called on WADA to launch an immediate investigation into the allegations less than three months out from the start of the Rio Olympics. A statement said: “Based on the findings of a WADA inquiry, the IOC will not hesitate to act with its usual policy of zero tolerance for doping and defending clean athletes.”
