Last week week, The Guardian reported this predictable development:
Russia has been handed a four-year ban from international sporting competition for a doping cover-up…
An emergency meeting of the World Anti-Doping Agency on Monday unanimously voted to exclude Russia and also prevent it from hosting or bidding to host any global tournaments. The ban was imposed by Wada’s executive committee after Russia was found to have tampered with laboratory data handed over to Wada…
Andy Brown at the Sports Integrity Initiative explains:
On 20 September 2018, WADA took a major gamble. The Russian authorities had not met its initial or amended conditions for RUSADA [the Russian anti-doping agency] to be reinstated, yet WADA reinstated RUSADA, to much criticism. The gamble involved a guess that either the samples stored at the Moscow Laboratory or the Moscow LIMS [Laboratory Information Management System] data had been manipulated (or both) during the three years they were under the protection of the SKR [the Russian Investigative Committee].
We now know that at least one of these assertions is accurate. Detailed work by both the I&I team and the CRC has uncovered manipulation of the LIMS… WADA’s I&I [Intelligence and Investigation] team deserves recognition for an excellent investigation.
Here’s WADA’s statement with a link to the I&I report. There’s a timeline of the forgeries on pages 13 to 15 of the report, in Section 3, “Event Charts.” The investigators detected a good deal of suspicious activity – mostly data deletion and metadata alteration (such as backdating). On top of that, they found fabricated messages – the most damning piece of evidence perhaps (see Sections 13 and 14).
One of the Russian government’s multiple avenues of defense in the 2014 Olympic doping case has been to accuse the whistleblower, Dr. Rodchenkov, and his associates of deliberately falsifying drug test results. According to the Russian theory, Rodchenkov extorted bribes from the athletes in exchange for covering up the supposedly positive tests. The whole database alteration exercise was apparently an attempt to make this claim plausible. On top of this, someone in Moscow created fake messages from and to Rodchenkov within the messaging service embedded in LIMS, backdating them to to 2014.
The I&I team detected the made-up messages. According to their report, some time between late November 2018 and mid-January 2019, someone (p. 47)…
(i) Modified the content of three Forum Messages in the Moscow LIMS…
(ii) Inserted 10 fabricated Forum Messages into the Moscow LIMS…
(iii) Deleted 25 Forum Messages from the Moscow LIMS…
Once the Russians went from tweaking the database to directly planting evidence to frame the whistleblower, they got caught red-handed:
The fabricated, modified and deleted Forum Messages are a stunning deception. They are the figurative “smoking gun”. Moreover, their existence demonstrates intent and provides a lens through which the totality of manipulations within the Moscow Data should be observed.
The modified and inserted messages evidence an intent to incriminate Doctor Rodchenkov, Doctor Sobolevsky and Mr Migachev. While the deleted messages evidence an intent to hide incriminating evidence and protect Mr Kudryavtsev, a key witness against Doctor Rodchenkov…
Last time they got caught was when they played with urine samples. That was almost innocent compared with the frame-up attempt. The next big question is whether it was humanly possible to tweak the LIMS database and avoid detection.