How the Kremlin Tried to Rig the Olympics and Failed
Vitaly Mutko
Shamed and pilloried  the head of the Russian Olympic Committee resigned and Russian leadership spoke of serious reform. âThe place we got in Vancouver is not worthy of our country â said then-sports minister and Putin friend Vitaly Mutko. âWe have to do everything we can to restore our leadership in world sports.â He promised to take âpersonal controlâ over the preparations for the Sochi Olympics  where the stakes would be far higher and which were just four years away. What if Russian athletes flopped on their home turf? It was a nightmare scenario. This is how we got to Tuesdayâs ban of the entire Russian team and various Russian officials  including Mutko  from the 2018 Winter Olympics  just two months before the opening ceremony in South Korea. There is a straight line from Vancouver to Pyeongchang  with a sordid stop in Sochi. * * * Authoritarian regimes love organized sporting events  like the Olympics  and Russia was one of the initiators of that love affair  back when it was the Soviet Union. For decades  the Kremlin poured money into Olympic sports. It was an important piece of propaganda for both the world and the Soviet home front: We are a superpower and our people are superpeople. Parents eagerly turned over their children to Olympic factories that would make their young ones into athletes who could do their country proud  and get their families a little extra something  be it more food or Western electronics. Olympic events like the famed 1980 hockey match between the Unites States and the Soviet Unionâknown as âthe Miracle on Iceââoffered easy analogies for larger geopolitical struggles. To be a true global power  you had to defeat your enemies in every arena.
Putin  like most people who survived the Soviet Union  never lost that vision of the Olympics as a proxy for geopolitics. It is why the flop at the 2010 Olympics stunned and humiliated Russia as much as it did. Russia looked in the mirror and didnât like what it saw. It found that despite a decade of unprecedented economic good fortune  of surging oil prices and rising salaries  of the glitz and glamour of its cities  the country was rotten at its core. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union  its infrastructure had crumbled and was never rebuilt. The glitz  it turned out  was just a patina of false prosperity.  Mutko  was unsparing in  his  assessment when the Olympic delegation returned  humiliated  to Moscow. âThere are a lot of problems â  he  said in March 2010. âOver the years  weâve frittered away our sport science and lost our human potential.â  He  noted that foreign athletes were trained by Russian coaches who had left Russia  and that in many sports  there was no new generation waiting in the wings. âThereâs also the problem of doping â he said. âSome of us can no longer think of preparing athletes without including doping substances. We began to fight doping with more conviction.â All of these  he said  âare systemic problemsâ and the Sports Ministry was working to solve them. âNeither I nor the Ministry of Sport deny our responsibility for the performance of the Russian team at the Olympics in Vancouver â he said. âWe will do a serious analysis  and there will be changes  both in terms of organization and personnel  on the basis of our experience in Vancouver.â
An analysis did come  just four months later and in the form of an audit from the Russian Treasury. It found that one of the reasons for the Russian failures in Vancouver was  Mutko  and the way he spent ministerial finances. In fact   Mutko  had spent so much money on himselfâ$1 400-a-night hotel rooms for 20 days  during which he had an astonishing 97 breakfastsâthat there was little left for the actual athletes and their support staff  many of whom traveled to Vancouver on their own dime.  Mutko  may have spoken that spring about  his  responsibility  but  he  took none this time. Any big organization will have its problems   Mutko  said when the report came out  but âI see a system thatâs nearly ideal ... I donât see a single problem. You couldnât possibly call 17 fourth-place finishes an ineffective use of funds!â In other words  with the home-game Olympics just three and a half years away   Mutko  had fixed everythingâthe rotten infrastructure  the lack of incoming talent  the Ã©migrÃ© coaches  the widespread dopingâin just four months. By the time the closing ceremony began in all its splendor in Sochi in February 2014  the Russian team had won the medal count. * * * We now know how  Mutko  was able to achieve that jump  from 11th place to first  in such a short amount of time: an extensive  state-sponsored doping campaign. After a German documentary interviewed two Russian athletes who had fled Russia and had become whistleblowers about how systematically Russia dopes its athletes  key figures in the world of Russian anti-doping started turning up dead under mysterious circumstances. This prompted Grigory Rodchenkov  the head of the Russian anti-doping agency  to flee  fearing for his life  to Los Angeles and to the director Bryan Fogel. The two had been working together on Fogelâs riveting documentary  âIcarus â about how easy it is for an athlete to dope and test clean. Rodchenkov  who had been coaching Fogel in his quest to dope for a cycling event and dupe the tests  decided to confess to Fogel  on camera. He also told his story to The New York Times  and then went into U.S. government witness protection.
Rodchenkov ran the lab at Sochi during the Winter Olympics  and what he did there was essentially what he did for Fogel  but on a more massive scale: helping dozens of athletes dope all through the Games while testing negative on every single test. The story he told to the Times and to Fogel would strain the imagination  were it not independently confirmed by two investigations: one by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and one by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Here is the summary of the operation  from the Times: The director  Grigory Rodchenkov  who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of Olympians  said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes  helping to facilitate one of the most elaborateâand successfulâdoping ploys in sports history. It involved some of Russiaâs biggest stars of the Games  including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds. In a dark-of-night operation  Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier  somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions  Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night  they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp  passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall  to be ready for testing the next day  he said. By the end of the Games  Dr. Rodchenkov estimated  as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged. None of the athletes were caught doping. More important  Russia won the most medals of the Games  easily surpassing its main rival  the United States  and undermining the integrity of one of the worldâs most prestigious sporting events. All of this  Rodchenkov said  was overseen by an officer of the federal security services  the FSB  and had the approval of  Mutko  and Putin.
Shamed and pilloried  the head of the Russian Olympic Committee resigned and Russian leadership spoke of serious reform. âThe place we got in Vancouver is not worthy of our country â said then-sports minister and Putin friend  [TGT] . âWe have to do everything we can to restore our leadership in world sports.â He promised to take âpersonal controlâ over the preparations for the Sochi Olympics  where the stakes would be far higher and which were just four years away. What if Russian athletes flopped on their home turf? It was a nightmare scenario. This is how we got to Tuesdayâs ban of the entire Russian team and various Russian officials  including Mutko  from the 2018 Winter Olympics  just two months before the opening ceremony in South Korea. There is a straight line from Vancouver to Pyeongchang  with a sordid stop in Sochi. * * * Authoritarian regimes love organized sporting events  like the Olympics  and Russia was one of the initiators of that love affair  back when it was the Soviet Union. For decades  the Kremlin poured money into Olympic sports. It was an important piece of propaganda for both the world and the Soviet home front: We are a superpower and our people are superpeople. Parents eagerly turned over their children to Olympic factories that would make their young ones into athletes who could do their country proud  and get their families a little extra something  be it more food or Western electronics. Olympic events like the famed 1980 hockey match between the Unites States and the Soviet Unionâknown as âthe Miracle on Iceââoffered easy analogies for larger geopolitical struggles. To be a true global power  you had to defeat your enemies in every arena.
Putin  like most people who survived the Soviet Union  never lost that vision of the Olympics as a proxy for geopolitics. It is why the flop at the 2010 Olympics stunned and humiliated Russia as much as it did. Russia looked in the mirror and didnât like what it saw. It found that despite a decade of unprecedented economic good fortune  of surging oil prices and rising salaries  of the glitz and glamour of its cities  the country was rotten at its core. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union  its infrastructure had crumbled and was never rebuilt. The glitz  it turned out  was just a patina of false prosperity.  Mutko  was unsparing in  his  assessment when the Olympic delegation returned  humiliated  to Moscow. âThere are a lot of problems â  he  said in March 2010. âOver the years  weâve frittered away our sport science and lost our human potential.â  He  noted that foreign athletes were trained by Russian coaches who had left Russia  and that in many sports  there was no new generation waiting in the wings. âThereâs also the problem of doping â he said. âSome of us can no longer think of preparing athletes without including doping substances. We began to fight doping with more conviction.â All of these  he said  âare systemic problemsâ and the Sports Ministry was working to solve them. âNeither I nor the Ministry of Sport deny our responsibility for the performance of the Russian team at the Olympics in Vancouver â he said. âWe will do a serious analysis  and there will be changes  both in terms of organization and personnel  on the basis of our experience in Vancouver.â
An analysis did come  just four months later and in the form of an audit from the Russian Treasury. It found that one of the reasons for the Russian failures in Vancouver was  Mutko  and the way he spent ministerial finances. In fact   Mutko  had spent so much money on himselfâ$1 400-a-night hotel rooms for 20 days  during which he had an astonishing 97 breakfastsâthat there was little left for the actual athletes and their support staff  many of whom traveled to Vancouver on their own dime.  Mutko  may have spoken that spring about  his  responsibility  but  he  took none this time. Any big organization will have its problems   Mutko  said when the report came out  but âI see a system thatâs nearly ideal ... I donât see a single problem. You couldnât possibly call 17 fourth-place finishes an ineffective use of funds!â In other words  with the home-game Olympics just three and a half years away   Mutko  had fixed everythingâthe rotten infrastructure  the lack of incoming talent  the Ã©migrÃ© coaches  the widespread dopingâin just four months. By the time the closing ceremony began in all its splendor in Sochi in February 2014  the Russian team had won the medal count. * * * We now know how  Mutko  was able to achieve that jump  from 11th place to first  in such a short amount of time: an extensive  state-sponsored doping campaign. After a German documentary interviewed two Russian athletes who had fled Russia and had become whistleblowers about how systematically Russia dopes its athletes  key figures in the world of Russian anti-doping started turning up dead under mysterious circumstances. This prompted Grigory Rodchenkov  the head of the Russian anti-doping agency  to flee  fearing for his life  to Los Angeles and to the director Bryan Fogel. The two had been working together on Fogelâs riveting documentary  âIcarus â about how easy it is for an athlete to dope and test clean. Rodchenkov  who had been coaching Fogel in his quest to dope for a cycling event and dupe the tests  decided to confess to Fogel  on camera. He also told his story to The New York Times  and then went into U.S. government witness protection.
Rodchenkov ran the lab at Sochi during the Winter Olympics  and what he did there was essentially what he did for Fogel  but on a more massive scale: helping dozens of athletes dope all through the Games while testing negative on every single test. The story he told to the Times and to Fogel would strain the imagination  were it not independently confirmed by two investigations: one by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and one by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Here is the summary of the operation  from the Times: The director  Grigory Rodchenkov  who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of Olympians  said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes  helping to facilitate one of the most elaborateâand successfulâdoping ploys in sports history. It involved some of Russiaâs biggest stars of the Games  including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds. In a dark-of-night operation  Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier  somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions  Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night  they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp  passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall  to be ready for testing the next day  he said. By the end of the Games  Dr. Rodchenkov estimated  as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged. None of the athletes were caught doping. More important  Russia won the most medals of the Games  easily surpassing its main rival  the United States  and undermining the integrity of one of the worldâs most prestigious sporting events. All of this  Rodchenkov said  was overseen by an officer of the federal security services  the FSB  and had the approval of  Mutko  and Putin.