CHAPTER 4
Stumbling Towards Sochi
The Cologne workshop was great: my brilliant colleague Dr Tim Sobolevsky presented a lecture on the newest long-term metabolites of anabolic steroids and received the Manfred Donike Award as the best researcher of the year in doping control, our equivalent of an Academy Award.
We went to an awards ceremony in a restaurant in a castle at the top of a hill in an ancient forest, where I drank red wine and thought about my crazy life. As soon as we’d discovered a test for the long-term metabolites, a significant analytical accomplishment, I’d started to work on a way to thwart the cutting-edge detection methods we’d discovered. This was why I was so useful to the Ministry of Sport! The ‘cocktail’ of three anabolic steroids with Chivas Regal was the perfect ‘antidote’ because it avoided the formation of long-term, traceable metabolites.
After the Manfred Donike Workshop, we WADA laboratory directors flew to London. At Cologne Bonn Airport, the officer checked my passport for five or maybe even ten minutes, which made me paranoid. I couldn’t remember passport control ever taking this long – were there special notations on my passport that indicated I was still under criminal investigation? The officer flipped through the pages of my passport and tapped some information into his keyboard. I stood in front of him, breathless, feeling like that knife was plunging into my heart again. Finally, I was allowed to fly to London.
The WADA meeting in Harlow ended with a tour of the laboratory, where we could examine their instrumentation. Taking photos was prohibited, but I ignored that rule and photographed everything. We were a small group and had been instructed to stay together, because the laboratory’s interior doors were locked as we proceeded from room to room. I lingered behind the rest of the group and photographed instrument after instrument, room after room.
It might sound like I was taking these pictures for espionage purposes, but I wasn’t. I was just two years away from opening my own Olympic laboratory in Sochi, and had already started battling to fit it with the finest laboratory equipment available. When I returned to Moscow, I would have to start drafting purchase orders for the Ministry of Sport, to buy analytical instrumentation, laboratory equipment, furniture and chemical reagents. If questions cropped up, I would have photos of the London laboratory as proof of what we needed.
Look – the British had them. We needed them, too.
My final draft contract for Sochi included 134 separate specifications for instruments, sample preparation tools, furniture, glassware, consumables and spares, worth about $10 million. I had to buy these items in May 2012, for delivery to Sochi in November. But the laboratory was at that time nothing but a swamp – and I was still under investigation and restricted from leaving Moscow.
The FSKN inquiry hung over me like a sword of Damocles. I tried not to think about it, but I did learn that my criminal investigation had been downgraded and that my previous investigator had been replaced with one who was less severe. He seemed unfocused, and left me alone for a while, but at the end of April he decided to drag me into court again and to commit me to a four-week psychiatric observation, just as his predecessor had done. I promised him I’d return to the Serbsky Institute after the London Olympic Games and showed him my personal invitation and Olympic accreditation. He seemed surprised, but didn’t back away from his plan. My problem was that I couldn’t leave Moscow to attend the Games as long as I was under criminal investigation. But I had my IOC accreditation for the Olympic Games, which also functioned as a visa for the United Kingdom, and I had my plane tickets to London booked for 17 July 2012.
I decided to travel to London by any means possible, through Belarus or Ukraine if necessary. Their borders with Russia were quite permeable, and I could easily escape from Minsk or Kiev. The FSKN might arrest me when I returned to Moscow, but at that point I wouldn’t care.
Then came 3 July 2012, a day I will remember forever. It was two weeks before my flight to London and I received a phone call at work. I saw the incoming phone number of my FSKN investigator and took the call in a state of suspended animation, as I always did when the FSKN called. The investigator spoke like a robot on a telemarketing call, telling me that my criminal investigation was closed and I needed to come to his office and sign the resolution papers. Then the call was over.
I couldn’t believe it, and called my lawyer. He phoned the FSKN, and they confirmed it: my case was dropped and life could begin again! I left the building and filled my lungs with fresh air, drinking in the bright sun and the scuttering clouds. It was as if the world around me had changed – the trees were trembling with life and their leaves shone greener than I had ever noticed before. Nature felt warm and friendly.
I had my freedom. I was over the moon. I called Veronika and told her that I was driving over to the FSKN headquarters to pick up my resolution papers, and that we should go to a restaurant to celebrate.
‘Calm down, and please drive safely,’ she told me several times.
As I approached the cursed FSKN building, rage mounted within me. Then I had the papers in my hand: eight pages, double-sided, in small type. I locked the doors of my car, checked to make sure that no one was watching me and read. All my purported sins were listed in detail, followed by the determination: not enough evidence to confirm, the investigation is closed.
At home, my whole family was bouncing off the walls – it was as if I had returned from prison. Veronika, my son Vasily and my daughter Marina had been suffering and fighting alongside me. They had been summoned to interrogations, but they had invoked their right to refuse to answer questions that might bring harm to a close relative. Vasily had just graduated from Moscow University’s physics department, just like his mother, and Marina had a Moscow University chemistry degree – the same one awarded to me 29 years previously.
I made a reservation at Porto Banus, a restaurant in Krylatskoe. It was an unforgettable family celebration. My wife and daughter were taking photos of me, while I looked completely dazed and kept hugging my dog Vrangel, who seemed to appreciate the situation better than any of us. We dangled some choice pieces of fish and meat in front of him, but he refused to eat them – it was as if he foresaw the catastrophes looming ahead of us, but was unable to warn us.
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With my visa and airline ticket in hand, I asked my lawyer to call and see if my name was on a ‘no-fly stop’ list, a pretty common trick used by the Russian security services. To be on the safe side, I took a copy of my resolution papers affirming that my criminal investigation had been dropped.
At passport control in Sheremetyevo International Airport, everything went smoothly. Na vsaky sluchay – ‘just in case’, as the Russians say – I was carrying a fifth of Balvenie 21-year-old whisky to celebrate with in London. The plane took off, and as usual, I spent the entire flight asleep. Napoleon could sleep in his carriage on the way to the battleground, and I could sleep on any flight, anywhere in the world. They laminated my accreditation at Heathrow and I headed to the Hilton overlooking Hyde Park, just a Yuriy Dumchev discus throw from Kensington Palace and the Serpentine lake. I would be staying there for three weeks, including the 14 days of the Games.
Just a few days before, I had been a phone call away from being incarcerated in a Moscow psychiatric hospital and now here I was, checking into a Hilton hotel in London as an ‘IOC Family’ member.
As part of the IOC Medical Commission, I received a per diem of $650 a day. When I received my $14,300 in cash, I was shocked to discover that most of the banknotes were dirty and covered with Arabic markings, random ink stamps and scribbling. This kind of suspicious cash hadn’t been seen in Russia since the 1990s! So each day that I wasn’t on duty at the Olympic laboratory, I went to the bank next door to the hotel and exchanged $1,500 into fresh pound notes. The teller eyed me with suspicion, but my shiny IOC accreditation forced her to smile and serve me.
The Harlow laboratory was theoretically only an hour away, but the BMWs provided for local transportation had obsolete navigational systems and it took the volunteer drivers two hours to reach our destination. Once we finally got there, it was like attending a college reunion. More than 60 foreign experts from WADA laboratories all over the world were sitting in cubicles, gossiping and waiting for lunch. In a glass-walled room, I sat next to Professor Christiane Ayotte from Montreal. There was a special room next door for Thierry Boghosian, the WADA independent observer who would have the same job at Sochi two years later.
Only a few foreign experts were allowed to participate in any real analytical work. The laboratory chief, Professor David Cowan, was very secretive and didn’t let anyone make copies of their written procedures. Whenever we showed up inside his security perimeter, all the computer displays were switched off – he obviously didn’t trust us.
Cowan seemed to avoid me but I had plenty of questions to ask him, since I would be opening the next Olympic doping control laboratory, in Sochi. One day I managed to snag him, and asked what the preliminary WADA inspections were like. He told that me that the process was simple: the inspectors had asked about security issues, camera surveillance and working conditions during the night shift.
‘That was really all they cared about,’ he said.
I was taken aback. ‘Are you serious? Didn’t they check your proposed methodology, your protocols, your instrumentation and analytical procedures?’
Cowan smiled coolly. ‘Oh, I think that would have been a bit too much for them,’ he said. ‘They really can’t do that kind of work.’
Did this exchange make me over-confident? Perhaps.
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When I got back to Moscow, two important tasks lay ahead. One was the construction of the new Anti-Doping Centre in Moscow and our planned move there immediately after the 2013 New Year celebration. The second task was preparing for Sochi, and the upcoming delivery of ten million dollars’-worth of instruments and laboratory equipment. The delivery was scheduled for mid-November, in 15 trucks. These items were all destined for our new building in Sochi, but where was it?
I flew to Sochi to see if the laboratory building actually existed, and how much of a threat would be posed by any delay. The builders were friendly enough and seemed hard-working, but it was clear that the laboratory wouldn’t be ready by the end of November, when we needed it. I had just started taking photos of the construction site, when a security officer accosted me and told me to delete my pictures immediately. He wanted to check that there were no images left in my phone, which I promptly dropped into the pocket of my jeans.
‘I’m taking photos for a report to the Olympic Committee and Minister Mutko,’ I told him. ‘Moreover, I specially came here to take photos of my laboratory.’ He started to waver, but then repeated that his job was specifically ‘to prevent picture-taking’.
‘I am the director of the Olympic laboratory,’ I explained, moving from a defensive posture to an offensive one. ‘Here, where we are standing, I am the one giving the orders – is that clear?’
He also switched tones, and explained to me in a mildly aggrieved way that there was no laboratory planned here – this was the proposed site of a secret building that no one was allowed to take photos of. Only later did I learn that this would be the FSB Command Centre, a secret police headquarters inside the ‘coastal cluster’ at Sochi that would share a fence with the Sochi Olympic Laboratory. Neither building existed yet: my laboratory was a skeleton and the Command Centre wasn’t much more than a poured concrete foundation. Who would have believed that this half-dug hole in the ground would become ground zero for the greatest cheating scandal in Olympic history?
That was my first look at the extraordinary joint venture in Sochi, the fusion of the Ministry of Sport and the FSB and the policy of ‘medals over morals’. Nobody, especially not I, could imagine how successful it would be.