Nearly Half Of The Sochi Olympics’ Russian Medalists Were Doping

According to the New York Times, nearly half of Russia’s medal-winning athletes from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, where Russia led the medal count, were doping with illegal performance-enhancing drugs at the time of the Games. This doping was planned years in advance to ensure the dominance at the Olympic games. This breaking news leaked as a result of revelations from Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the state-sponsored doping program who fled from Russia to the United States after a report from the World Anti-Doping Agency named Rodchenkov as a principal instigator of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program back in November.

After the report was released, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov fled the country because he feared for his safety. The news that we are bringing to you came from his first public comments since he fled the country. The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics didn’t go well for the Russians, so they pressured Dr. Rodchenkov to figure out a way to ensure their success at the Sochi games, so he came up with a combination of three anabolic steroids—metenolone, trenbolone and oxandrolone–that would speed up the athletes’ recoveries, meaning they could compete at their top performance day after day. The combination of drugs were mixed with whiskey for men and vermouth for women in order to speed up absorption and minimize the window for detection.

“People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine. Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?” Dr. Rodchenkov said.

Rodchenkov says that he and his staff, that were responsible for anti-doping efforts at the Sochi games, were assisted by Russian intelligence officers in trading the positive samples taken from Russian athletes in supposedly tamper-proof containers and replacing them with clean urine samples collected months earlier. None of the athletes that participated in the doping were ever caught, which is very surprising. This is one of the most successful and elaborate doping operations that has ever taken place in sports.

“We were fully equipped, knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly prepared for Sochi like never before,” he said. “It was working like a Swiss watch.”