Looking back over a long and rather eventful career, it seems the tougher the situation, the more ferocious the criticism, the more likely it is that our firm will get involved.
A case from mid-2016 unleashed one of the biggest controversies of my career, as our firm helped expose the biggest Olympic doping scandal of all time, weeks before the start of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. My partner Sallie Hofmeister (a former reporter and editor for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) and I gave the worldwide scoop as an exclusive to the New York Times, which published a stunning page-one exposé on Friday, May 13, 2016, and ran a front-page follow-up the next day.
The story told in definitive detail how some government officials in Russia had orchestrated a doping program that served dozens of Russian athletes, including fourteen members of the cross-country ski team and two bobsledders who had won two Olympic gold medals. The Times called it “one of the most elaborate—and successful—doping ploys in sports history,” and the story was picked up and repeated around the world in the ensuing weeks. There was ample time for Olympic officials to investigate the allegations and eventually ban more than a hundred members of the Russian team from the 2016 Summer Games.
Our timing was intentional. Our clients were the director and producer-financier of a documentary film on the doping scheme, and they were concerned that the film’s credibility and the integrity of its central character would be attacked. By giving the Times months to corroborate the film’s allegations, we pre-empted such attacks while promoting the film before it had even been sold.
This case begins, as many of my cases do, with a phone call from someone’s lawyer. Earlier in the year, I had been approached by a lawyer who had worked with me on a number of cases in the past, Ed Stier, who represents another Sitrick client, the private-equity investor Ray Chambers (co-founder of Wesray Capital, one of the first private-equity firms). Stier was looking for PR for a small documentary, but the film was months away, the budget was limited, and Sitrick And Company doesn’t do red-carpet movie PR.
A couple of months later, though, he returned to me with the full story, and we could instantly see the momentous impact it might have. Stier wanted me to help his client, the documentary company and its filmmaker, Bryan Fogel. Cycling, perhaps even more than filmmaking, is Fogel’s fierce passion, and he was devastated by the fall of Lance Armstrong, the greatest cyclist in history, who, after years of denying persistent allegations, admitted to doping only after his own teammates turned him in. This story fascinated Fogel. Why had the authorities been unable to detect the repeated, apparently widespread doping?
The same question could be asked about the Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez, whom my firm represented in the aftermath of his steroid scandal. A-Rod was penalized only after a former ally accused him of using performance-enhancing drugs, not because Major League Baseball officials had detected any violations.
The Armstrong scandal gave Fogel an idea. What if he entered a sanctioned bicycle race, doped himself in a way so as not to get caught, and then showed in a documentary film how he did it? He started with a race in France, forgoing any performance-enhancing drugs as a base metric and finishing fourteenth among several hundred entrants (which in itself is pretty damned impressive).
The filmmaker then talked to anti-doping experts about his idea, but no one dared to get involved. Eventually, however, a scientist told him to contact a man in Moscow, one of the leading anti-doping experts in the world, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who agreed to help Fogel dope himself for the next race. Meeting with Fogel over Skype, Rodchenkov told him to get a prescription for steroids and showed him, on-screen, how to inject them—not into his leg, where the bruising would be detected, but in the buttocks. Fogel filmed these lessons.
Fogel then entered a second race, and though he didn’t finish as well (accident, equipment failure), he felt much stronger under the effects of the steroids. His recovery time was much faster than it was after the first race, when he could barely move and slept for the better part of a week.
During all of this, German television aired a documentary on Olympic doping, featuring a confession from a member of the Russian women’s track team, a middle-distance runner named Yuliya Stepanova. Cited for doping violations, she spoke out, asserting that numerous other Olympic athletes had been doping as well, including four of Russia’s gold medal winners. The documentary fingered one main character as responsible for the entire operation: Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of Russia’s anti-doping lab—and now Bryan Fogel’s steroid advisor.
The broadcast alleged that Russian athletes paid bribes to Rodchenkov for his illicit help, a charge he vehemently (and convincingly) denied. Ms. Stepanova claimed she gave money to her coach, who said he needed it to give to Rodchenkov. The coach may have received money from Stepanova, Rodchenkov later told us and the New York Times, but he never passed it along to the doctor.
With its reputation in question, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which had accredited the Moscow lab, ordered an independent investigation of the allegations, releasing its findings in November 2015. Among its recommendations: that Rodchenkov be removed from his position for aiding the widespread cheating among athletes and for destroying 1,417 lab samples to obstruct follow-up tests.
As a result of the WADA investigation, his bosses in Moscow had asked Rodchenkov to resign, and he complied. Whispering into his computer, over Skype, he told Fogel that officers with Russia’s FSB (the former KGB) were in his home watching his every move. He told Bryan he needed to escape to the United States.
Bryan arranged for Rodchenkov’s passage, picked him up at LAX, and drove him to a nondescript apartment that would be his temporary home for the next several months. Rodchenkov told Fogel that while he never took any bribes for providing performance-enhancing drugs to Olympic athletes, he did follow orders to provide the drugs to those on “the list” given to him by Russian government officials. Fogel now realized he had a much bigger story to tell.
“Everybody’s Doping”
Rodchenkov said it was his job to run the doping program at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. He was under immense pressure to produce medal winners and let Russia recover from a mediocre sixth-place finish at the previous Winter Games. “Everybody’s doping,” he said, adding that he was convinced that few Olympic athletes could win a gold or silver medal without doping, no matter what country they were from.
It was a terrific story, but my clients, the filmmaker Fogel, and his producer-financier Dan Cogan, worried that those fingered in Rodchenkov’s story, including some government officials, might try to discredit him as a rogue lab operator, though he convincingly insisted he had been doing their bidding, and that U.S. investigators might take an interest in his case, possibly turning against Rodchenkov. Moreover, Fogel fretted that the anti-doping agency and the International Olympic Committee, with billions at stake in TV contracts and sponsorships, might be reluctant to investigate at all, fearing a revelation that the entire testing system was broken. Maybe they would prefer to bury it just two months before the 2016 Summer Games in Rio.
In addition, the IOC would be deciding in weeks whether to lift a ban on the Russian track team imposed after the WADA investigation had confirmed the allegations of the German documentary and let the team compete in Rio. Fogel hoped to influence that decision with his newly discovered information, yet his documentary wouldn’t be ready until well after the Rio Games. Rodchenkov’s revelations were huge news, and Fogel wanted to make them public before the IOC made its decision.
What to do? Media from all over the world had been trying to get Rodchenkov to speak with them, but at the filmmaker’s request he had refused interviews. The filmmaker and his producer suggested going wide all at once: host a press conference for all comers and release the details of the new documentary’s revelations months before the film itself could be seen. Sallie and I were able to convince them otherwise, after I pointed out the drawbacks. What if no one shows up? It’s unlikely you could draw much of a crowd without giving away the scoop. And even if you did get people to show up, you would probably get only a smattering of small stories because you couldn’t go into enough detail for an in-depth story. Their reluctance to put Rodchenkov out there for mass questioning, moreover, further reduced the likelihood that there would be meaningful coverage.
We decided, instead, to strike preemptively, having Fogel and Rodchenkov go public in a very big way, and fast—yet by going narrow and deep, rather than going wide and shallow, as a press conference would have done. We needed the perfect Lead Steer for this mission, one with international influence but also with the heft of ink. We suggested the New York Times: global reach, impeccable reputation, great reporters. Fogel and Cogan agreed. It turned out a Times reporter, Rebecca R. Ruiz, had written about the IOC and the doping investigation prompted by the German documentary. Though Sallie and I didn’t know Ruiz, we both knew the Times’ top editor and decided to take this scoop straight to him.
We held off, however, while Fogel spent the next few weeks working on a distribution deal with a premier cable network, including an exclusive with its sibling, a cable news network. Sallie and I, concerned that if we launched this story with the cable news network alone the rest of the media might not notice and follow, suggested that the network share the exclusive with the Times.
Bryan Fogel and Dan Cogan got pretty far down this promising path, meeting with a dozen producers and editors at the cable news network’s headquarters, before talks broke off. The news came on Sunday, May 1, just two weeks before the World Anti-Doping Agency was to release its recommendation on whether to lift the recent ban on the Russian track and field team. Sitrick And Company had to move fast.
So the next day, Sallie and I made the pitch to the New York Times editor over the phone, with the paper’s top investigative editor also on the call. Sallie and I cited Rebecca Ruiz’s stories about the WADA investigation and pointed out that this story would show how athletes could dope through an entire Olympics, avoid detection, and take home the most gold medals.
The story was assigned to Ruiz along with Michael Schwirtz, who had spent six years reporting in Russia for the Times and spoke the language fluently. This was an especially astute move, as Schwirtz’s language skills would prove essential to discerning the nuances in Rodchenkov’s responses to the reporters’ questions.
The next day, we did a run-through with Fogel and his star witness, Grigory Rodchenkov. Because of the sheer volume of the documents, we were concerned about how to present the information. We also worried that Rodchenkov’s limited English might hamper the questioning.
We advised Fogel and Rodchenkov to unspool their story to the Times reporters pretty much as they had told it to us but with more details—what the room looked like where the swapping of samples took place and whether it was dark or well-lit, what Rodchenkov was wearing on his late-night rendezvous with FSB agents, exactly how tainted samples were swapped for clean ones through a small hole in the wall separating the official lab from a secret and illicit lab next door, and how they covered up the hole during daytime hours.
That night, Ruiz and Schwirtz flew to Los Angeles for three days of interviewing. The next morning, Wednesday, May 4, Bryan Fogel arrived at 8:30 at a conference room at our offices with his dog, Max, a big, beautiful Vizsla with high anxiety. Fogel explained that Max could not stand to be alone and would tear up everything in his apartment if left behind—an effective strategy, from the pooch’s point of view. Fogel and Rodchenkov had bonded over their dogs, displaying them for each other during Skype calls.
The Times reporters showed up at nine o’clock and began the interviews, spending hours interviewing Rodchenkov and Fogel and examining documents, spreadsheets, emails, and photographs showing how the elaborate doping-lab operation worked. Max the anxious Vizsla spent much of the time snoozing. We ordered lunch and worked straight through until seven o’clock that night.
At Noon, a Sudden Glitch
The next day, Thursday, the fifth, went much the same way, with Fogel’s high-strung pup again napping on scene. By noon, however, there was a glitch: Fogel’s attorney, Ed Stier, called me to say that producers at 60 Minutes had just contacted him about a story airing that Sunday on Olympic doping and the Russian female athlete in the German documentary. They wanted to interview Rodchenkov.
For a variety of reasons, including fear that the film’s thunder would be stolen, Fogel and Cogan unequivocally vetoed the idea of Rodchenkov’s talking to 60 Minutes. Sallie and I informed the Times reporters, who still were in the midst of their interviews, that 60 Minutes was airing a doping story imminently, though without any contribution from our clients. Not to do so might make them think we had been double-dealing with a second outlet.
After three final hours with Fogel and Rodchenkov on Friday, the reporters returned to New York to spend the next week doing more reporting, checking their facts, corroborating Rodchenkov’s claims, and writing a long, vivid account of what Rodchenkov had told them.
The Times posted the big exposé online in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, May 12, and let the scoop run online all day long before publishing the story on page one of the print edition the next morning, Friday, the thirteenth. The thoroughness and sophistication of the reporting was worthy of the “paper of record.” A two-column headline at the top of the page declared, “An Insider in Sochi Tells How Russia Beat Doping Tests.” Deck: “Shadow Lab Used to Replace Tainted Samples in 2014 Olympic Quest.” Lead:
LOS ANGELES—Dozens of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15 medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.
Most amazing of all, these allegations were leveled not by some unnamed source or just one athlete with limited knowledge. The primary source for this story was on the record and fully identified: Grigory Rodchenkov, director of the Russian-run anti-doping lab for the entire Sochi Games. He described to the Times misdeeds and deceptions that went well beyond what he had told anti-doping investigators months earlier. This was one of the first times a top insider in a major athlete-doping ring has stepped forward to tell all.
The story delivered riveting details: the Russian sports ministry had guided the scheme, Rodchenkov meeting weekly with the number-two official at the ministry; Rodchenkov himself had developed a cocktail of three anabolic steroids that top Russian athletes used at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London and at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi (later, it would come out that the cocktail had a name: Duchess); in Sochi, Rodchenkov’s overseers had given him a spreadsheet listing athletes on the doping program and their competition schedules so he could be ready to swap out the urine specimen of anyone on the list who medaled.
Because the Sochi Games were hosted by Russia, it had control of the on-site drug-testing lab for all nations’ athletes, enabling it, according to Rodchenkov, to run a tampering scheme to favor its own teams. As the Times reported, the Russians set up their own secret lab next door to the official antidoping lab, passing tainted and untainted samples back and forth between the two labs through a hidden hole in the wall.
The official lab was overseen by Rodchenkov and an independent observer in daytime hours. But after midnight, the Times story said, Rodchenkov “changed from his lab coat into a Russian national team sweatshirt and left his fourth-floor office . . . and made his way to Room 124, officially a storage space that he and his team had converted into a shadow laboratory.”
Agents in the official lab would hand “dirty,” drug-tainted urine samples of Russian athletes to agents in the secret lab, so the bad specimens could be swapped for “clean” samples. By the end of the games, more than a hundred dirty urine samples had been replaced, according to the story in the Times. Rodchenkov and his associates also were able to ensure that only “clean” samples from Russia’s drug-taking athletes would end up in storage at the IOC’s sample vault in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Russian athletes won thirty-three medals at the Sochi Games, more than any other nation and ten more than in the 2010 Winter Games, where Russia had placed sixth in total medal count. Of those thirty-three medals, one-third went to athletes named on that spreadsheet. For his work in 2014, Grigory Rodchenkov received the prized Order of Friendship from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The entire operation was so well disguised that Rodchenkov also received commendations from the IOC and from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which issued a report calling Sochi “a milestone in the evolution of the Olympic Games antidoping program.”
Yes, it was—but not in the way WADA had intended.
The Times exposé ran at a “crucial moment for Russia,” as the story noted. The Russian track and field team, suspended six months earlier, was up for consideration to be allowed to compete at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The Times ran a follow-up story on page one on Saturday, the fourteenth, on another stunner that emerged from the original interview with Fogel and Rodchenkov—the supposedly tamper-proof vials for Olympic drug-testing that the Russians had figured out how to breach without detection. These vessels, thought to be inviolable, had been compromised, letting Russian lab officials replace steroid-tainted urine samples with “clean” ones that had been collected months earlier from the athletes and were hidden in everyday consumer containers such as water bottles.
A Thousand Articles Worldwide
That same morning, I explained my strategy to Dennis Kneale. As the Times published prominent follow-ups in the coming weeks, we would line up follow-on interviews at a few other outlets, “and then we’re done. Bet you we get a thousand articles worldwide.” Sure enough, more than a thousand articles would follow the Times story in the ensuing eight weeks.
The response and fallout were swift and sweeping. A flood of media calls came in to Sitrick And Company, thanks in part to Bryan Fogel’s setting up a temporary website, at my suggestion, listing his contact details and those of the firm. But we held off providing Rodchenkov or Fogel to other media for interviews, figuring the rest of the press already was reporting what the Times had reported first.
The Russian government dismissed the Times story as a political attack. “These allegations look absolutely groundless,” a spokesman for President Putin told Russian reporters the day after the story was published. “All this simply looks like slander by a turncoat.” On Sunday, April 15, the Russian sports minister bylined a piece in the Times of London apologizing for previous doping by his track and field athletes but pleading for their ban to be lifted for Rio. “Serious mistakes have been made by the federation management, along with athletes and coaches who have broken anti-doping rules and neglected the principle of fair play. . . . Let us be clear. We are ashamed of them,” he wrote.
A few days later the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice had “opened an investigation into state-sponsored doping by dozens of Russia’s top athletes. . . .” The IOC called the Times’ revelations “very detailed and very worrying,” deferring to the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Meanwhile, we were working on encouraging a second wave of coverage after the crescendo of “folos” that the Times scoop would unleash. The goal was to ensure that WADA immediately and thoroughly investigated and vetted what Rodchenkov had said. We suggested that Fogel write a letter to the World Anti-Doping Agency, calling for an immediate investigation of the violations cited in the Times exposé, and slating it for delivery on the day the story ran. Sallie worked on the letter in between other matters for the next couple of days, massaging it into shape even as she connected the Times team with a corroborating witness who had worked for Rodchenkov.
After WADA had received the Bryan Fogel letter, the agency announced it would, indeed, undertake the probe that Fogel had requested. This, we figured, would produce another round of coverage once WADA did the testing, providing reporters with something new beyond the original story. Someone at the anti-doping agency leaked the Fogel letter to his rival—the producer of the German documentary featuring the doping confession of the Russian runner Yuliya Stepanova. The producer posted Fogel’s letter on Twitter, along with video of Skype calls with Rodchenkov, which had been recorded unknowingly and surreptitiously, according to Rodchenkov.
In June, the global governing body for track and field barred the entire Russian track team from competing in the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. On July 18, the World Anti-Doping Agency released a hundred-page report on its investigation of the allegations in the Times story, confirming all of Rodchenkov’s detailed claims.
The investigators got access to ninety-five urine samples from Russian athletes in Sochi stored in the IOC vault in Lausanne and chose eleven at random for inspection. All eleven showed signs of tampering, with scratches on the inner ring of the bottle caps and abnormal levels of table salt in the urine—that last detail a clue that Rodchenkov had advised investigators to search for in the samples as a way to prove he was telling the truth. He had added salt to the clean samples to give them the proper weight compared with the originals.
The very next day, the anti-doping agency took the unprecedented step of recommending that the IOC ban the entire Russian Olympic delegation from the 2016 games—every athlete in every sport. The anti-doping agencies of the United States, Canada, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and New Zealand were organizing to make a similar plea to the IOC. Meanwhile, an appeals court upheld the ban on Russia’s track team.
Russia’s President Putin responded by suspending the sports officials criticized in the report and asking for “fuller, more objective information that is based on facts,” and warning, “Today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports.”
The reverberations continued in the weeks leading up to the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio. Just twelve days before the start of the Summer Games, the IOC rejected the WADA recommendation to ban the entire Russian team from Rio, instead leaving it to each of the twenty-eight sports federations to decide which Russians would be allowed to compete.
This ruling presented a logistical nightmare. As the New York Times’ Rebecca Ruiz reported on Sunday, July 24, 2016, “The worst fears of some antidoping officials were realized when, only a few hours after the Olympic committee’s announcement on Sunday, the tennis federation cleared for competition all eight Russian athletes who had qualified for the Games with seemingly little scrutiny. Officials cited 205 doping samples among the eight players since 2014.”
Ultimately, one-third of the Russian athletes were banned from the Rio Games for their involvement in the Kremlin’s doping conspiracy, 118 competitors in total. Two-thirds of the Russian team, some 271 athletes, were allowed to compete. Russia’s entire boxing team was admitted, but track and field, weightlifting, and rowing fielded no teams at all—their entire rosters were banned.
In the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, the Russians garnered 27 percent fewer medals than they had won in the 2012 Summer Games in London, when the doping was underway; in Rio they grabbed nineteen golds (down three), eighteen silvers (down five), and nineteen bronzes (down thirteen).
Icarus Soars at Sundance
And our client’s doping documentary? Bryan Fogel’s film, titled Icarus, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was purchased by Netflix for one of the highest prices ever paid for a nonfiction film at Sundance. Variety reported, “The $5 million pact is one of the biggest ever for a non-fiction film.”
As this book went to press, Grigory Rodchenkov was in the U.S. Witness Protection Program. Without him and Bryan Fogel and Dan Cogan, their lawyers—including Ed Stier—and the help of the Sitrick team, this stunning Olympic scandal might still be buried in the darkness of the IOC vault in Lausanne rather than sparking global outrage.
Still other crises sparking worldwide outrage have tested the wits and resources of Sitrick And Company, and next we will see how I handled one of the fiercest debates of my career, navigating through swirling strains of grief, anger, suspicion, prejudice, and outright racism a decade after the 9/11 attacks. I did so in defense of a project opposed by fully 70 percent of the American people: the Ground Zero Mosque.