CHAPTER 1
Operation Sochi Resultat
In 2013, the countdown to the Sochi Games had begun. We spent the Orthodox Christmas holiday moving our instruments into the new four-storey Moscow ADC, constructed behind the VNIIFK building, where the laboratory had been housed since 1979. I informed WADA that we had relocated, and they planned an inspection for late January. In anticipation, Blokhin, the FSB officer assigned to monitor my laboratory and RUSADA, installed eavesdropping equipment in the rooms where the WADA inspectors would be interviewing my personnel.
After visiting both new laboratory buildings in Sochi and Moscow, the WADA team left. A few days later, Blokhin came to my office, beaming.
‘Why are you so happy – was your wiretapping successful?’ I asked him.
‘Relax – maybe I’ll tell you later.’ He scampered off to the gym, but accepted my invitation to lunch at a local Azeri restaurant, famous for its tequila, green salad and succulent lamb.
On that winter’s day in Moscow, roughly a year before the start of the Sochi Games, the world of sport changed forever. I plied Blokhin with tequila, hoping to learn about WADA’s plans, but he refused to talk about the wiretapping. Blokhin was laconic. He didn’t engage in small talk, and he generally didn’t ask questions. (Ask not, lest ye be asked …) However, after cautiously surveying the restaurant, he edged his chair closer to mine and told me that his team of ‘magicians’ had managed to successfully open BEREG-kit B sample bottles.
I was flabbergasted. This breakthrough was like the splitting of the atom. If true, it would change the arc of my life and the future of Russian sport.
I decided to test him. ‘I have two filthy samples back in the laboratory,’ I said, ‘from two track and field athletes whom we reported negative. But their urine is full of dope – can you unscrew caps from their B bottles for me?’
Blokhin did not answer and just stared at me, as if he hadn’t heard the question.
‘Please, open these bottles for me. I even have the athletes’ clean urine ready for swapping.’
He remained silent, as if he regretted spilling the beans in the first place. After a pause, I tried a different tack. ‘Does Deputy Minister Nagornykh know about your success?’
Still Blokhin stayed quiet.
‘Look, if you can’t take these two B bottles, I could approach Nagornykh and he could officially request that they be opened?’
My taciturn companion suddenly spoke. ‘No one else needs to get involved. I’ll take your damned bottles, but for now, this stays between us.’
I escorted him back to the ADC, handed over the bottles in a double plastic bag and thanked him, before following him out our front door – I wanted to be sure that he didn’t change his mind.
Nagornykh’s intimation that our B bottle problems might soon be solved had hinted at this breakthrough. My associates had told me that Blokhin had been collecting the metal rings with teeth and the lock springs from discarded BEREG-kit A plastic caps, in addition to closed B bottles from out-of-date storage samples that were awaiting disposal. My friend Dr Nikita Kamaev, the executive director of RUSADA, also told me that Blokhin was collecting new BEREG-kit bottles of various designs.
However, figuring out how to open them with no trace of damage had until now remained an apparently impossible task. I knew that Berlinger, the Zurich-based manufacturer of the BEREG-kit bottles, had always insisted that the technology they used meant that no one could tamper with their sample bottles and avoid detection. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, they make that claim to this day.
A few days later, Blokhin returned with the bottles. FSB engineers had opened both of them cleanly, and Blokhin, his face alight with a conspiratorial smile, handed me the undamaged caps. I was shocked as I carefully inspected the surface of the glass bottle and its plastic cap inside – they were separated, but they appeared to be intact. Blokhin told me that the removal had proceeded smoothly, after which they had erased any visible scratches. They had damaged the serrated metal ring inside the plastic cap but had substituted a replacement one, shiny and intact.
Blokhin left my office, and I ran to the Ministry of Sport to inform Nagornykh. This was the same path I had taken on 30 October 1985, when I went to apply for the job of junior researcher at the VNIIFK doping control laboratory. Nagornykh now occupied the office formerly assigned to the VNIIFK director; he was ecstatic at the news and congratulated us profusely before sprinting down the hallway to report to Mutko, who I’m sure passed the word to President Putin.
Three years later, the filmmaker Bryan Fogel asked chief investigator Richard McLaren, appointed by WADA, what would happen if doping laboratories could switch out B samples at will. McLaren replied that it would render all doping control ‘illusory’. Truer words had never been spoken.
❊
This was the key that slipped the lock for Operation Sochi Resultat.
A Sochi Games triumvirate was forming: me, Nagornykh and Irina Rodionova, a former champion swimmer, doctor and close associate of Nagornykh’s who had been brought in as our liaison with the winter sports teams. We had to focus on the opportunity offered by Sochi: between 30 January and late February of 2014, all the Olympic doping control samples would be passing through our laboratory. And from the week before the Games until a few days after they closed, WADA would have no jurisdiction in Sochi – we’d have to file our analyses with ADAMS, but would report results to the IOC and to no one else. We needed to exploit this situation, on behalf of Russian athletes.
By early 2013, we knew that we had a nearly undetectable steroid delivery system in the ‘cocktail’, as well as backup protection if we needed it; we could remove and swap tainted urine from an athlete’s A and B bottles. Irina performed some mental calculations before announcing matter-of-factly that Russia would win 15 gold medals in Sochi. I was shocked – we had won just three gold medals at the previous Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver in 2010 – but she was confident, and she would turn out to be pretty much right.
Despite our confidence, the three of us agreed that the Russian doping programme was clearly under siege, as the surprise WADA visit to the Moscow Centre had shown. Someone, in all likelihood an insider, was reporting on us. We formulated an action plan to carry us through the Sochi Games:
- When necessary, we would falsify an athlete’s dirty urine in both the A and B bottles. One method would be substitution – the athlete pours in clean urine from a freezer and seals the bottles at the collection sites. This could be done in the presence of a corrupt RUSADA doping control officer and would make my life easier, since there would be no need to misreport a negative result to ADAMS followed by the headache of the ticking time bomb of a sealed B bottle – because it would contain ‘clean’ urine. As a last line of defence, if dirty urine from a protected athlete was delivered to the Moscow laboratory, we could misreport and swap the samples with ‘clean’ urine from CSP freezers, but that would require the assistance of FSB experts in opening the sealed B bottles.
- No WADA-appointed DCOs or IDTM or Munich-based PWC agents would be allowed to remove doping control samples from Russian soil, under any circumstances.
- We would use the ‘Duchess’ cocktail for the steroid programme. It was easily administered, and washed out of the athlete’s body within a few days.
All systems were go.
❊
While our battle with WADA simmered in the background, our plans for the Sochi Games became more and more brazen. On 4 April, Nagornykh called me into his office and unveiled his latest idea. There happened to be a big biathlon event in Moscow, and the biathlon – cross-country skiing combined with marksmanship – was a huge fan favourite in Russia; but sadly for Russia’s medal; hopes at Sochi, two of the world’s promising biathletes, the twin sisters Valya and Vita Semerenko, were Ukrainian.
Nagornykh knew that my laboratory could turn a positive sample into a negative, and because he was focused on winning at all costs, the opposite idea had occurred to him.
‘At the Anti-Doping Centre,’ he asked carefully, ‘could we make the Semerenkos’ clean results dirty?’
I was shocked and frightened – I didn’t know where this would lead. ‘For what purpose?’
Nagornykh explained. ‘These Ukrainian biathletes are going to be ferocious competitors at Sochi, and Vita Semerenko is in Moscow right now. I could ask RUSADA to take her sample and then let you know her code number …’
He gazed at me, awaiting my response. It was the only time in my life when I regretted not having a pocket tape recorder. What Nagornykh was suggesting was illegal and unethical – and in the bare-knuckle world of Russian sport, it was a very dangerous suggestion. If the Ukrainians ever traced the false positives back to me, they would set fire to my car – or much worse.
I needed the world to know that this was Nagornykh’s idea, and that I opposed it. Yes, I had turned hundreds of positive samples into negative ones, but I never did the opposite, or even had any thought of such a thing. None of my friends or colleagues had ever asked me to make the urine samples of innocent athletes look like they were doping either! In my mind, I unreeled the riot act that I should have read to Nagornykh.
I tried to explain to Nagornykh why this was a bad idea, but chose my words carefully – no one wants an enemy with the title ‘Deputy Minister’.
‘It would be hard to disguise the fact that her urine sample hadn’t passed through her body, but had been spiked from the outside. Furthermore, as top-tier athletes, the sisters are in the International Testing Registered Pool. Suppose they were targeted for an out-of-competition test a few days after our Moscow laboratory accused them of doping and tested clean, with no traces of the substances we claimed to have discovered in their urine?’
Nagornykh retained his poker face.
‘That would trigger an immediate investigation of us,’ I said. ‘It would present a grave danger, both for our Sochi plans and for everything that lies ahead. I can’t see making that work right now, so let’s stay focused on Sochi and not make trouble for ourselves.’
I held my breath. Thank God, Nagornykh finally relaxed and agreed with me.
To be fair, his high opinion of the Ukrainian biathletes proved correct. Their women won the biathlon relay in Sochi – four gold medals for four girls!
I left Nagornykh’s office and took a deep breath. Occasionally, when under stress, my childhood asthma re-asserted itself; only when I filled my lungs with outdoor air could I marshal my thoughts. Yes, of course I could make clean urine look dirty, but it was an outlandish request and the risks far outweighed the possible rewards. I needed to talk to someone, so I approached my laboratory colleague Dr Tim Sobolevsky and asked him a ‘theoretical’ question about how he might go about deliberately tainting urine samples. He found the question odd, and asked where it came from.
‘Guess,’ I said.
‘Nagornykh,’ he replied. ‘It couldn’t be anyone else.’
I described the ‘Ukrainian proposal’ to my childhood friend, the RUSADA director Nikita Kamaev, who had had his eye on our esteemed deputy minister since he attended a special sports school as a high jumper.
‘Nagornykh understands nothing,’ Nikita told me. ‘You could doctor the urine in an A bottle, but the B bottle would still contain clean urine!’ Nikita did not know that we had just figured out how to open the impregnable B bottles.
‘Do you know why Nagornykh got kicked out of sports school?’ Nikita asked me. ‘He was caught stealing running shoes from his teammate. Then he went on to flourish in the Komsomol [the Young Communists League], a typical career for an ambitious sports apparatchik.’
❊
WADA kept on coming to see us – someone was whispering in their ear. In that same month, they sent a bulked-up inspection team to Moscow, this time adding John Miller, the head of WADA’s Laboratory Expert Group, and Professor Jordi Segura, director of the Olympic doping control laboratory in Barcelona, to their team. This was their third on-site inspection in six months, which seemed suspicious. After all, the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre was the most productive anti-doping laboratory in the world – in 2011 and 2012, we had analysed 15,370 and 17,175 urine samples, more than any other WADA-accredited laboratory.
Fulfilling quotas was one thing, but we couldn’t shake our reputation for questionable analyses. For example: From the batch of 67 samples WADA had seized the previous year, they analysed 55 and found oxandrolone metabolite in Pishchalnikova’s sample, but they weren’t able to analyse the remaining 12 samples because there wasn’t enough urine left in the A bottle. Rabin then ordered the 12 B bottles to be split into B1 and B2 for analysis, revealing two more positives that we had misreported.
Rabin smelled blood. After he found these two misreported positives, he ordered the Lausanne laboratory to reanalyse the previous 54 samples (not including Pishchalnikova’s) in the same way, by splitting the B bottles. We, Moscow and Lausanne, had reported all 54 samples to be negative, but if the B bottles were reanalysed, then Lausanne laboratory would find eight to ten positives. That in itself would be a catastrophe, but when they realised that the A and B samples contained different urine – that we had falsified the samples after being asked to preserve them – WADA would close down the Moscow ADC in a heartbeat and our planning to obtain accreditation for the Sochi laboratory would be over.
But then a miracle occurred. In conformance with WADA rules, the Lausanne laboratory had destroyed our 54 ‘negative’ samples after storing them for three months. WADA had been informed that if they wanted to retain the samples they would have to pay for extended storage, but they never responded and our problems were tossed into the garbage.
One problem had been solved, but another took its place when WADA put our EPO detection methodology under the microscope. We happened to be doing some routine testing while they were in our laboratory, and – voilà! – a textbook positive result appeared. The sample belonged to a female biathlete who had been tested in-competition, and we were happy that WADA had witnessed the analysis, by way of proving our expertise and honesty. Our visitors assumed that we would download the results to ADAMS, after seeking the mandatory second opinion from a WADA expert in Barcelona, but would we?
The positive belonged to our ‘biathlon princess’ Svetlana Sleptsova, but there was no way we could report her positive because she was under the direct protection of Mutko. As I have already explained, biathlon was a sacred cow in Russia – not only did Sleptsova command a huge TV audience, but the powerful oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov was president of the Russian Biathlon Union. We were in a real bind. The WADA team had witnessed this positive analysis with their own eyes, and they wouldn’t forget it. Sleptsova was untouchable, but with the Sochi Games less than a year away, we couldn’t afford a doping scandal.
I explained the situation to Kamaev and asked him whether RUSADA could falsify Sleptsova’s doping control form (DCF), by inserting a different name and a non-winter sport. We couldn’t make the positive disappear, but we could assign it to someone else, maybe someone in a non-Olympic sport.
‘We might have got away with that a year ago,’ Nikita explained, ‘when the laboratory sent the positive results to ADAMS, and RUSADA could take a while before sharing the athletes’ names with the international authorities.’ But that was no longer the way things worked. ‘WADA now insists the national anti-doping agencies download all documents, and names especially, to ADAMS immediately, even before delivering the samples for analysis to the laboratory.’
‘So, Grinya, no way to help you, my friend, sorry for that,’ he concluded.
I was called Grinya in our apartment building’s courtyard 40 years ago.
But don’t forget: This was Russia, the land of miracles.
I explained the problem to Nagornykh, who put the squeeze on RUSADA until they reluctantly falsified the case documentation in September. After their creative rewrite, Sleptsova’s positive disappeared and was replaced by a thirty-something female sambo wrestler suspected of EPO use. Of course, we had to explain our misreporting and delay in a corrective action report (CAR), which was one of the most challenging documents I have ever written. It took me ten drafts to describe our web of obfuscations, which George Orwell had captured so well in 1984, when he talked about being able ‘to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.’
That was my CAR#19 in a nutshell.