Russia ordered 2013 athletics world championships doping cover-up, says Wada investigator

An independent investigator appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) said on Friday that the Russian government covered up positive drug tests at the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow.

In a statement, Professor Richard McLaren said the Russian ministry of sport was involved in instructing a Moscow anti-doping laboratory to “not report positive sample results over the period before, during and after the IAAF Championships in 2013”, with Wada adding that government interference had started as early as 2011.

McLaren’s statement was issued just hours after the IAAF, world athletics’ governing body, voted unanimously to uphold the ban on the doping-tainted Russian federation, but left the door ajar for some track and field stars to compete at the Rio Olympics as neutrals.

Russia was first banned in November after a damning Wada independent commission report said there was state-sponsored doping and mass corruption in Russian athletics.

In May, Wada set up a new investigation under McLaren, a Canadian law professor and longstanding member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), into allegations of state-backed doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia.

Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Russian lab now living in Los Angeles, also gave an interview to the New York Times last month in which he said he switched tainted urine samples for clean ones at the doping lab used for the Sochi Games, with help from people he believed to be officers of the Russian security services.

In his statement on Friday, McLaren said IAAF taskforce chairman Rune Andersen had written to him asking for “mutual cooperation” and in particular share, as early as possible, “any evidence that I obtained that sheds light” on the credibility of Rodchenkov’s allegations.