The Latest: Pound: ‘State-supported’ doping in Russia

GENEVA (AP) — The Latest from the IAAF investigation (all times local):

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3:45 p.m.

WADA commission leader Dick Pound says Russia seems to have been running a “state-supported” doping program.

Pound says “I don’t think there’s any other possible conclusion.”

On Russia’s sports minister Vitaly Mutko, Pound says he believes it was “not possible for him to be unaware of it.”

Pound says if Mutko, who is also a FIFA executive committee member, was “aware of it he was complicit in it.”

Pound suggests “it may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”

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3:37 p.m.

The man who spearheaded an investigation into doping in Russian track said the widespread rule-breaking is “worse than we thought.”

While discussing the 300-plus-page report released Monday, Dick Pound said that, unlike corruption in other sports, the Russian doping scandal has actually affected results on the field of play.

He was drawing a parallel to the FIFA scandal, in which top soccer executives have been accused of widespread corruption.

The track scandal is different because, according to the report, track athletes have been allowed to compete even though authorities in their country knew they were cheating.

The report said the London Olympics were more or less sabotaged because of this.

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3:30 p.m.

The leader of the commission investigating widespread doping in the Russian track system says he wants to see better ways for whistleblowers to come forward without feeling the risk of retribution.

Dick Pound, who spearheaded the report, said the World Anti-Doping Agency should find ways to make it easier for truth-tellers to speak out.

The Canadian says that often, whistleblowers are reluctant to come forward but says the report released Monday is proof that there can be results from speaking out. And, he says, the 350-page report is just the tip of the iceberg.

Among the recommendations was the lifetime bans of five athletes, four coaches and another administrator in the Russian program.

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3:15 p.m.

The gold and bronze-medal winners at 800 meters at the London Olympics are among the five Russian runners targeted for lifetime bans by an independent commission tasked with investigating widespread doping in that country.

The commission recommended lifetime bans for Olympic champion Mariya Savinova-Farnosova and bronze medalist Ekaterina Poistogova.

The commission’s report said the London Games were sabotaged because track’s governing body and Russia’s anti-doping authority didn’t take doping seriously enough and allowed runners to compete who should not have.

The recommended lifetime bans were part of the commission’s 350-page report that came out Monday.

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3:10 p.m.

The WADA commission suspects Russia has been using an obscure laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow to help cover up widespread doping, possibly by pre-screening athletes’ doping samples and ditching those that test positive.

It says whistleblowers and confidential witnesses “corroborated that this second laboratory is involved in the destruction and the cover-up of what would otherwise be positive doping tests.”

It says the “Laboratory of the Moscow Committee of Sport for Identification for Prohibited Substances in Athlete Samples” is controlled by the Moscow city government and operates in an industrial zone about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the city center.

It says this laboratory “could be used as a first step to identify test samples of Russian athletes who have suspicious or positive urine samples” and that “pre-screened samples that were not positive could then be sent to the accredited laboratory,” also in Moscow.

It says the Russian anti-doping agency and Russian athletics federation must know about the lab, stating “it is not credible to believe” that they didn’t.

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3:10 p.m.

The WADA commission wants the agency to strip accreditation from the Moscow laboratory and fire lab director Grigory Rodchenkov.

The report says the “Moscow laboratory is unable to act independently,” citing interference from government agencies, including the FSB secret service.

The report says Rodchenkov is “an aider and abettor of the doping activities” and “at the heart of the positive drug test cover-up.”

Rodchenkov was key to “the conspiracy to extort money from athletes in order to cover up positive doping test results.”

In one case, he was paid indirectly by an athlete, who turned whistleblower, to hide a failed doping test. The cash courier was “a known performance-enhancing substances trafficker.”

Under Rodchenkov’s leadership, “many tests that the laboratory has conducted should be considered highly suspect.”

The Moscow lab oversaw testing for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and is due to work on FIFA’s anti-doping program for the 2018 World Cup.

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3:07 p.m.

The WADA report says Moscow testing laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov ordered 1,417 doping control samples destroyed to deny evidence for the inquiry.

The inquiry report says Rodchenkov “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 Rodchenkov’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, Rodchenkov 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.”