CHAPTER 2
The Two-front War
The war with WADA would continue almost until the opening ceremony in Sochi. But wars are fought on many fronts, and a spectacular bomb exploded in July, when we least expected it. The integrity of the upcoming Sochi Games, the British Daily Mail reported, had ‘been plunged into doubt by allegations that Russian athletes are doping under instruction from coaches and are assisted by cover-ups at the country’s main anti-doping laboratory.’
The exposé had two main thrusts: First, it quoted several Russian athletes who said that they had been forced to participate in a national doping programme. Oleg Popov was quoted as saying, ‘Not only does an athlete have to take illegal drugs, he also has to pay money in our anti-doping laboratory for substituting the samples.’ This accusation was made by the coach of Lada Chernova, the javelin thrower who tried to destroy her tainted sample in my laboratory twice, indoors and outdoors, while I watched.
The Mail’s second line of attack was aimed directly at me. ‘The boss of the key [doping control] laboratory,’ the newspaper reported, ‘was arrested and questioned on suspicion of sourcing and selling banned drugs,’ referring to my 2011 confrontations with the FSKN. The article highlighted my suicide attempt, my institutionalisation and my sister Marina’s arrest for ‘buying and possessing banned drugs that she admitted she had intended to supply to athletes.’
The Mail fretted that honest British athletes, such as runner Lynsey Sharp or long jumper Gregory Rutherford, would lose medals to drugged-up Russian competitors. The Mail asked out loud if notorious dopers like the Russians could be trusted to operate an Olympic laboratory at the Sochi Winter Games. They then quoted an IOC spokesman, who predicted there would be no problems:
‘There will be at least 20 international experts working in labs throughout the time of the Games to ensure the very best methods and practices … In addition, there will be three experts in the IOC Games Group whose specific task will be to oversee and guarantee the integrity of all processes of analyses and reporting to the IOC.’
This was true, but to catch our cheating would take someone as deeply steeped in it as we were! WADA would never have any real oversight in my laboratory. Just as Professor David Cowan kept people like me and Professor Christiane Ayotte at arm’s length from his analyses in the Harlow laboratory, I was careful who I invited to Sochi. I didn’t want anyone sniffing under the table or peeking behind doors.
The article itself was less important than its timing and where it appeared. This wasn’t journalism – this was a sucker punch in a mixed-martial arts cage match. I was reasonably sure that the ‘facts’ had been leaked by my old adversary Alexander Chebotarev, a clever lawyer who was waging a running battle against RUSADA, representing such athletes as Lada Chernova and Darya Pishchalnikova. I never regarded him as an enemy, and he taught me a lot, but – he just seemed eager to earn money, become famous and occupy a very profitable niche in the world of sports jurisprudence.
With the Olympic Games just seven months away, someone claimed they had informed WADA of irregularities in the Russian doping programme, and that WADA had turned a deaf ear. Well, not any more. The Daily Mail website had millions of readers all over the world; the door on the ‘Russian doping scandal’ had cracked open.
It closed again, quickly. There would be no follow-up to the Mail’s story, but someone was definitely out to get us. First we had been subjected to the surprise inspection and the ongoing WADA investigation, and then we had been publicly accused of cheating. Life was about to get even more interesting – and not in a good way.
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In September 2013, WADA conducted a fourth pre-Olympic inspection of our laboratory. The visitors were Thierry Boghosian and John Miller from WADA and Professor Jordi Segura from Barcelona, who was also the president of the World Association of Anti-Doping Scientists (WAADS). They presented us with a list of 56 alleged discrepancies in laboratory operation routine, 33 of which we had resolved acceptably with corrective action reports. In their view, 15 discrepancies remained unaddressed, and eight others had only been partially fixed. They were particularly irate about the misreporting of Sleptsova’s EPO case, and they were far from convinced by our ‘discovery’ that the positive result belonged to an unknown sambo wrestler.
They were threatening to suspend the accreditation of the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre, which would automatically shut down our brand-new, $30 million laboratory in Sochi.
Segura told me straight out that WADA was preparing an attack on the Moscow laboratory. Our fate would be decided at WADA’s fourth World Conference on Doping in Sport in Johannesburg, scheduled for mid-November. There had never been a showdown of this magnitude in the brief history of sport doping control. I would be facing a Disciplinary Committee consisting of former WADA president Dick Pound, the British barrister Jonathan Taylor and the USADA scientist Dr Larry Bowers.
I figured Bowers, who understood bench chemistry and whom I had known since the 1990s, would support me, but I couldn’t take any chances with the seasoned international lawyers Pound and Taylor and retained my lawyer, Claude Ramoni. Testifying against us was the Laboratory Experts Group, consisting of Olivier Rabin and John Miller. They clearly declared their intentions – they wanted a six-month suspension of our accreditation. This was just like facing the accursed Basmanny District Court in Moscow, where the sentence had been decided beforehand.
I was angry. It was true that, as lawyers say, I came to these proceedings with ‘unclean hands’, but I felt our sins were few and our accomplishments many. We were about to open the best Olympic laboratory ever built. The FSKN had nearly driven me to suicide; this WADA onslaught felt like more of the same.
Learning that my fate had already been baked into their deliberations, I launched my counterattack: my Summa Contra WADA, named after the famous arguments of ancient philosophers against false scientific concepts. I had plenty of help from three professors, Christiane Ayotte, Jordi Segura and Martial Saugy from Lausanne, and we proved to be a far stronger team than the LabEx functionaries.
My main points were:
- The Moscow ADC was one of the most innovative and productive laboratories in the world. I challenged WADA’s concept of the ‘negative’ analytical result, pointing out that there was no definition of such a result in WADA’s International Standard for Laboratories. As anti-doping detection technology becomes ever more sensitive and precise, any negative can in theory become positive after reanalysis.
- Almost all the ‘errors’ attributed to us could be explained by discrepancies in the sensitivity of our instruments. The technology in the Sochi laboratory would be better; the latest models were purchased. But our Moscow ADC equipment was a mixture of old and new tools, since we were using the newest instrumentation for research and development of methods. At the time when WADA launched its crusade against us, we used old models for everyday analyses and we were overwhelmed by the move into a new building.
- I emphasised that WADA’s accusation of ‘false negative results’ in the Sleptsova EPO sample was ‘unacceptable’, and fully resolved and explained in my corrective action report.
I think the transcripts of those hearings may one day be included in textbooks. It cost me a lot of money, aggravation and time that should have been spent preparing the Sochi laboratory; all I could think about was that if I failed, the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre would be ruined, my 50 employees would lose their jobs and my high-wire act of balancing the competing interests of doping control and the medal-obsessed Russian sport bureaucracy would come to a crashing halt. As they say in Hollywood, I would never work in this town again.
I flew to Johannesburg two days early to meet Claude Ramoni and we discussed the issues and decided what we would say during the hearings. Despite my misgivings, the Independent Disciplinary Committee turned out to seem quite impartial. The chairman, Dick Pound, didn’t talk much and appeared to zone out during the discussions. Larry Bowers was the only member who had worked in a doping control laboratory; he sat close to me and seemed independent, reluctantly supporting me or explaining the technical points I was making. The other commissioner, Jonathan Taylor, acted like a referee, monitoring the timing of the presentations and trying to soothe tempers when arguments became emotional or unproductive.
Olivier Rabin often ignored the documents that were under discussion, and instead invoked mysterious intelligence data about cover-ups in the Moscow laboratory. As we would later learn, some low-level whistle-blowers had indeed been feeding him information. He assumed a serious political face when referring to these shadowy charges, but it didn’t seem to have much effect on this audience. The agenda items had been pre-approved and Rabin’s wool-gathering didn’t seem welcome.
I remember feeling sick to death of WADA’s hypocritical pettiness regarding doping control. They spent all their time feigning concern about the 1 per cent of positive analyses they received from laboratories, when they knew full well that between 30 and 40 per cent of athletes were doping in sports like track and field. One of their key accusations against us consisted of six positive results, following the reanalysis of 2,959 samples using triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer analyses, which only two laboratories in the world could have performed – ours and Cologne. Furthermore, those six positives surfaced only thanks to our own analysis of the long-term metabolites of steroids! We had actually discovered 20 positives, but Nagornykh only allowed us to report six of them.
In the end, the Disciplinary Committee formally suspended the Moscow laboratory for six months, but then postponed their own suspension for six months, to give us time to engage ‘independent quality management’ experts to address our alleged shortcomings. This was a good result – I had six months of breathing space that extended beyond the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi, which was all I needed.
As I rejoiced in my diary, ‘Now I am playing with white pieces!’ Yes, I am Russian to the core – I love eating borscht and playing chess.
The indecision was symptomatic of WADA at its worst. I had been censured but could keep working. They brayed about ‘clean’ sport, but lacked the will to act. I didn’t want to protest too much, of course. On to Sochi!
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Blokhin and his magicians at the FSB were perfecting the dark art of opening the B bottles. The illicit uncapping was slow at first, requiring one or two hours to open just a couple of bottles. Even worse, the magicians showed their hands sometimes, leaving scratches or cracking the plastic cap. However, their performance and speed soon dramatically improved.
Blokhin had used the summer Universiade Games, which had been held in Kazan in July, to gain expertise in sample collection at an international multisport event. We concluded that the substitution of dirty urine for a clean specimen at Sochi’s remote collection stations, where there would be 16 doping control stations in all, could blow up in our faces, so we decided to swap the samples inside our Sochi laboratory, where we could control any threats and uncertainties.
It was time to figure out the logistics and to ‘think outside the box’, as Dr Olivier Rabin was so fond of saying.
My staff and I spent the months preceding the Games shuttling between Sochi and Moscow. Our Sochi laboratory was actually 20 miles from the centre of Sochi in the suburb of Adler, where Sochi International Airport and the ‘coastal cluster’ of Olympic venues were located. The wonderful Adelphia Hotel, just 300 feet from the Black Sea, became my second home.
My long-time assistant, the former world-class marathon runner Yuri Chizhov, drilled the famous ‘mousehole’ in the wall, about eight inches off the ground. The hole connected the strictly controlled Room 125 inside the security perimeter, where samples were ‘aliquoted’ or apportioned, and our ‘operational’ Room 124, which was not surveilled by security cameras. Samples that needed to be swapped could move from the tightly monitored aliquoting area to the neighbouring room, and then Blokhin could remove them to the FSB’s Command Centre in the next door building, where we kept four freezers full of clean, pre-tested urine and where the magicians could work through the night.
Blokhin, masquerading as a plumber, would spend the nights in the laboratory, assuring the smooth transfer of BEREG-kit bottles to the Command Centre and back again. On 30 December I gave Deputy Minister Yuri Nagornykh a briefing on our preparations. He gave us his blessing and gathered the lab’s key personnel for a photo. It was funny to see Chizhov wearing a suit and tie, but a visit from a deputy minister required a certain protocol!
On Christmas Eve, we conducted a night-time ‘stress test’ in the Sochi laboratory, simulating the precise conditions of the Olympic Games. At midnight, we accepted and registered 96 urine and 44 blood samples, opened them, aliquoted them and sent them upstairs for analysis via a special elevator. My hard-working team of young girls and boys were enjoying fulfilling their life’s dream of working at the Olympic Games!
But while I watched the rehearsal, I was estimating how many BEREG-kit bottles with dirty urine could be surreptitiously removed from the reception area, and for how long? How much time would we need to move those bottles to the Command Centre to be clandestinely opened and bring them back for swapping and resealing? I estimated we would have two hours each night – any more would be dangerous – which meant we could swap 10 to 12 urine samples a night, and no more. All samples had to be aliquoted and transferred for instrumental analysis by 7am at the latest.
This operation would be as delicately choreographed as the most intricate performance at the Bolshoi Ballet, but instead of dancers, we were using the secret police.