GENEVA (AP) — The Latest from the IAAF investigation (all times local):
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3:07 p.m.
The WADA report says Moscow testing laboratory director Grigory Rodchenko ordered 1,417 doping control samples destroyed to deny evidence for the inquiry.
The inquiry report says Rodchenko “personally instructed and authorized” the destruction of evidence three days before a WADA audit team arrived in Moscow last December.
The WADA panel says it wanted to send the Russian athletes’ samples to labs in other countries to detect banned drugs and doping methods.
The report says Rodchenko’s action “obliterated forever the attempt to determine if there was any evidence of athletes having clean and dirty ‘A’ samples at the Moscow laboratory.”
When the auditors arrived in Moscow, Rodchenko told them he decided to “do some clean up to prepare for WADA’s visit.”
Rodchenkov, the report notes, “remained obstructive” throughout the investigation and refused to be recorded.
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3:07 p.m.
The WADA reports says agents from Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, infiltrated anti-doping work at the Sochi Olympics.
The report says “impartiality, judgment and integrity were compromised by the surveillance of the FSB within the laboratory.”
One witness told the inquiry that “in Sochi, we had some guys pretending to be engineers in the lab but actually they were from the federal security service.”
The inquiry says this was part of a wider pattern of “direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state with the Moscow laboratory operations.”
Staff at the Moscow lab believed their offices were bugged by the FSB.
An FSB agent, thought to be Evgeniy Blotkin or Blokhin, regularly visited.
The report says lab director Grigory Rodchenkov was required to meet with Blotkin/Blokhin weekly to update him on the “mood of WADA.”
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3:05 p.m.
The commission looking into widespread doping in Russian athletics has recommended lifetime bans for five Russian middle-distance runners and five Russian coaches and administrators.
The commission said that the London Olympics were more or less sabotaged by allowing Russian athletes to compete when they should have been suspended for doping violations.
They blamed what they called an inexplicable laissez-faire attitude toward anti-doping by the IAAF and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.
The World Anti-Doping Agency sent the recommendations for the lifetime suspensions to the IAAF in August and made them public today with release of a 350-page report detailing the allegations.
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3:05 p.m.
The WADA commission says Russian Sports Ministry Vitaly Mutko issued direct orders to “manipulate particular samples.”
Mutko denied wrongdoing to the WADA inquiry panel, including knowledge of athletes being blackmailed and FSB intelligence agents interfering in lab work.
Mutko, who is also a FIFA executive committee member and leads the 2018 World Cup organizing committee, was interviewed by the WADA panel at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich on Sept. 22.
His ministry is cited in the report for asserting undue influence over the Moscow lab.
Mutko did tell the WADA inquiry he was “disgusted with the whistleblowers” who made claims of corruption.
The report says Mutko “does not believe their allegations and says they had no right to make the recordings and that such tapings are matters for the public prosecutors.”
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3 p.m.
WADA’s independent commission says Russia’s athletics federation should be suspended and its track and field athletes banned from competition until the country cleans up its act on doping.
The commission recommends that the World Anti-Doping Agency immediately declare the Russian federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition.
The report recommends that the International Olympic Committee not accept any entries from the Russian federation until the body has been declared complaint with the code and the suspension has been lifted.
Such a decision could keep Russian athletes out of next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
But the WADA report says “timely action” by Russian authorities “should mean that no significant competitions will be missed.”
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3 p.m.
The WADA commission has directly accused the Russian government of complicity in the widespread doping and cover-ups exposed in a damning 323-page report.
It says its 11-month probe hasn’t found written evidence of government involvement.
But it says “it would be naive in the extreme to conclude that activities on the scale discovered could have occurred without the explicit or tacit approval of Russian governmental authorities.”
While its report largely focuses on doping in Russian athletics, it adds “there is no reason to believe that athletics is the only sport in Russia to have been affected.”
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