Grigory Rodchenkov, head of Russia’s anti-doping center, but in 2015 fled to the United States. Talk to the former Moscow observer correspondent about lies, facts and life on the run.
The boy in front of me is dressed in a costume. We’re talking on skype. I’m in a house near London and Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov is in an unknown position somewhere in the United States, guarded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through armed FBI agents. What’s he like? “My life is beautiful. My temper is very good,” he says. He’s smiling, I think. While wearing a black shawl on his face and dark glasses, it’s hard to say.
The layer and dagger atmospheres surrounding our interview may seem a little exaggerated. Until, as you may recall, Vladimir Putin’s traveling assassins check to identify Rodchenkov’s secret location so that he can be extinguished, a traitor to the state. The Russian president has a long list of enemies. But Rodchenkov, the 21st century’s greatest-life sports whistleblower, is probably at the top.
Rodchenkov, director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre. The super lab call is not well chosen. As Rodchenkov recounts in a captivating memoir, The Rodchenkov Affair, he directed Russia’s doping program. He developed a new cocktail of drugs to help his country win. I had 3 anabolic steroids that were almost undetectable. Athletes spinning it around the mouth, combined with Chivas Royal or vermouth.
The Russian state-sponsored doping operation is a very complicated, subtle case for many years. And a success. Moscow has cheated to win medals in successive foreign competitions. They included the 2012 London Olympics, the “dirtiest in history,” according to Rodchenkov. The fraud peaked at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, organized through Putin and a moment of patriotic pride.
What did the Russian president know? According to Rodchenkov, the lot. “I was aware of this operation. He was regularly informed, yes,” he said. After each episode of doping, Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko, a loyal undisputed e-book, gave the impression and informed the president. Putin asked if there was anything Mutko needed. “The role of the state is certainly clear,” Rodchenkov says.
During the Cold War, doping was rampant in the Soviet bloc. Rodchenkov recalls how, as a promising student athlete, he first took performance-enhancing drugs in 1981 while sitting on the couch of his Moscow apartment. His mother, a doctor, injected him with a steroid called retabolil in his right buttock. “The drugs were intoxicating. Maybe I feel the power pouring into my big buttocks, the hardest, hardest muscle in a runner’s body,” he wrote.
Rodchenkov studied chemistry at Moscow State University. In the mid-1980s, he was assigned a task in the USSR doping lab. He prospered there and was given to execute the status quo after rubbing shoulders with his boss. Rodchenkov admits in his career to have covered many positive doping effects for Russian athletes, many of whom are stars. He says he coordinated the program with Kremlin politicians and senior sports officials.
In politics, Putin decided as president to assign Russia as a wonderful power. In sports, however, things weren’t going so well. In 2010, he was disappointed by the Russian team’s failure at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where he won only 3 past medals. Sport and ideology go hand in hand; In the run-up to the Sochi Games, Putin has issued orders for Russia’s functionality to be advanced as a matter of urgency, the whistleblower said.
I ask Rodchenkov what we think of the London Olympics. At the time, they felt magical. We now know, thanks to his revelations, that there was endemic trap in Moscow. Rodchenkov acknowledges that the Games have been exceptionally dirty and partly blames the “poor analytical performance” of the UK Anti-Doping Laboratory in Harlow, Essex. He was unable to identify 126 cases of positive doping, he said, and added 82 in athletics.
By the time the Sochi Games arrived, Moscow had taken its doping operation to a dizzying level. Rodchenkov says Putin sent the FSB, the secret spy firm he once ran. An organization of FSB officials was secretly inserted into Rodchenkov’s doping team. The spies made a miraculous breakthrough: they discovered how to open the tamper-proof bottles used in urine tests. Positive samples can be replaced with blank samples.
Rodchenkov compares Sochi’s behind-the-scenes drama to a thriller. “It’s Ian Fleming! It’s James Bond number two!” he said with a note of pride. His lab has developed what he calls an “exchange system.” Before the Games, the Russian Olympians produced blank urine samples. These were carefully stored. Athletes, especially older athletes, who benefited the most, drank Rodchenkov’s hard cocktail of drugs.
In the specially designed laboratory in Sochi, where urine samples from Olympic athletes would be taken after each event, Rodechnkov’s assistant, Yuri Chizhov, drilled a small gap in the wall. I was in room 125. The room was connected to room 124, where the FSB had previously stored blank urine samples in a refrigerator. Working in the middle of the night, scientists and ghosts exchanged bottles as samples of athletes arrived. “It was a perfect fraud,” Rodchenkov recalls. “There were no security cameras.” The Western anti-doping inspectors who passed in saw nothing abnormal; The mouse hole looked like an inoperable force output. “They were incredibly naive. They may simply not perceive or estimate the extent of our lies and forgeries,” he tells me. An FSB officer, Evgeny Blokhin, oversaw the entire operation, disguised as a non-guilty plumber. Rodchenkov describes Blokhin as a “pure infantry soldier” of the provinces who “executed the orders.” He considers Russian athletes who participated in the fraud to be cheaters. They knew that the state benefits that accompanied Olympic prestige depended on keeping quiet. Most of them have.
I have long been fascinated by the motivations of those who paint for Putin’s ghost state: why do it? Between 2007 and 2011, the FSB broke into my apartment several times while I was the correspondent for parents and observers in Moscow, a small platoon of ghosts. Rodchenkov knows the FSB. He says his recruits aren’t “homogeneous.” There is a rivalry between Moscow’s spies and a tough organization in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, he said. “Some other people are patriotic,” he adds. “They are obsessed with Leninist ideas. Others think they’re James Bond. And some of them are thieves, fakes and bastards. They just need to make money. Blokhin, he says, knew nothing about doping when he received the Sochi mission, called Operation Result: he learned temporarily and became a spouse in what Rodchenkov calls “our fraud.”
At the end of the Games, Rodchenkov exhausted. He had overtaken Wada from the World Anti-Doping Agency; Putin gave him the Order of the Frifinishship. In 2015, however, they began their disorders. The German television channel ARD accused him of presiding over a vast doping programme. And Wada recalled Sochi’s samples, which led Rodchenkov’s lab to throw positive bottles at a landfill 30 km from Moscow.
Rodchenkov learned that his stage is now incredibly dangerous. In November 2015, he took the fateful resolution to flee Russia. He packed a carry-on bag containing his computer’s hard drive: evidence of Kremlin crimes. He flew to Los Angeles and stayed with filmmaker Bryan Fogel, whose documentary about the case, Icarus, would win an Oscar. A month after arriving in the United States, Rodchenkov confessed everything to the camera: lies, cover-up, the almighty role of the state.
Nearly five years later, Rodchenkov says he made the right decision. He says he misses his circle of relatives extraordinarily: his wife, Veronika, and the young Vasily and Marina, who stayed in Moscow with their dog. They were locked in a country house outside the capital, seeking to avoid the coronavirus. “They are wise people. They sense it’s much older for me not to be in a grave next to Nikita. Nikita is Nikita Kamaev, Rodchenkov’s DEPUTY. Kamaev was discovered dead in mysterious cases shortly after Rodchenkov fled to California. Another colleague and the sporting director, Vyacheslav Sinyev, died the same month. Rodchenkov believes they were killed.” Nikita had written a book. I told him to stop, ” he said. The FSB wiped out Kamaev with an “invisible inoculation,” he believes.
Rodchenkov says writing his revealing e-book was easy. As a teenager in the Soviet Union, he wrote 44 volumes of newspapers. He wrote the first piece of the Rodchenkov affair without delay after his arrival in the United States. After denouncing doping in the Kremlin, Rodchenkov hid and moved several times. He wrote so much that he had to “cook, cook and mix” the manuscript, joked: the vocabulary of doping.
He spreads his memoirs with quotes from George Or, who, he says, understood the deceptive nature of Moscow’s power. “Cheating, lying and denial are basic to political life in Russia,” Rodchenkov observes. He is a fan of Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray as Walter Scott and Iris Murdoch. He also likes the wonderful Russians: Lermontov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, as the poets Joseph Brodsky and Daniil Kharms.
Putin, of course, denies acting badly. He says Russia is the victim of a hypocritical Western plot, run by Washington and London. Few people outdoors are convinced of Russia. Rodchenkov’s revelations led directly to the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee for World Sport; The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has gone back in this factor and allowed some Russian athletes to compete at the 2016 Rio and Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Games.
Lately, Moscow has a nice four-year ban on major foreign sporting events. It is not known whether his team will participate in the postponed Toyko Olympics next summer or at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. There are few signs that the Kremlin is in a position to recognize irregularities; Instead, says Rodchenkov, Russia last year deleted its entire database of results from doping controls, which gave WADA a counterfeit edition with unfavorable entries removed.
At home, Russian state media paint Rodchenkov as a con man and a fabulist, who sold his homeland for 30 pieces of silver. Rodchenkov recognizes himself as a past whistleblower. Possibly it would have been some time before he intervened, however, nevertheless, he talked about the aspect of justice and transparency, illuminating the world about the irregularities on a galactic scale committed through a pathologically deceptive regime.
He concludes his e-book by writing, “I am finally happy to be in the aspect of truth.” It’s an admirable feeling, but Rodchenkov is well aware of the value that worries him in his ethical position. The Kremlin, he says, will kill him if he can: “It’s a truth of life. I was scared for only two or three days.” I know it will never stop, ” he says, “even after Putin’s death.”
Luke Harding is from Shadow State: Murder, Chaos and Remaking of the West of Russia, which will be held at the Guardian Bookstore.