Ruiz: How Russia cheats
LAUSANNE, Switzerland - ‘What do you think about your new president - you are shocked?”
The man posing the question to me was Mikhail Kusnirovich, owner of Russia's largest department store. He and Donald Trump had tried to strike a deal to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Red Square years before, he said. He went on to answer his own question. “I think he's going to be good.”
It was December 2016 in Kusnirovich's office overlooking the Kremlin, weeks before U.S. intelligence agencies would publicly conclude that Russia had interfered in the election in the interest of tilting it toward Trump. Nesting dolls with the U.S. president-elect's face stared out of stalls at the holiday markets. But the topic at hand for me was not election meddling but rather Russia's sophisticated cheating at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Russia's two subversions, of global sports and U.S. democracy, have more in common than you may think. Both involve intelligence agents, Russia's will to win and the same cyberespionage team. Both have prompted millions of dollars of investigations and challenged public confidence - in the purity of sport and in the strength of democracy.
The two breaches are at the heart of how President Vladimir Putin has suggested he wants to reclaim Russia's past: by weakening Western democracy and dominating world sports.
Kusnirovich belonged to a group of prominent public figures focused on restoring Russian sports to good global standing. The group was created last summer by Putin after revelations that the nation had stolen medals in Sochi by relying on steroid-laced martinis, hundreds of ounces of stockpiled urine free of drugs and the overnight stealth of the country's Federal Security Service.
The Kremlin dismissed the details of both schemes as “absurd,” but, on Dec. 5, Russia was barred from the 2018 Winter Games for its state-backed cheating. Some individual Russian athletes may compete independently, but the Russian flag will not appear at the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
The details of the sports scandal - deconstructed by Russian whistleblowers who have provided rare insider insights - offer perhaps the purest case study of Russia's drive to dominate, its brazen methods and, in part, its motivation to influence the U.S. presidency.
In a declassified intelligence report released early this year, U.S. officials said Russia's attacks on the election had been, for Putin, partial payback for what he repeatedly called a U.S.-led effort to use the doping scandal to defame Russia. Last month, as new medals were stripped from Russian Olympians, Putin said the disqualifications were the United States' attempt to undermine his re-election.
In fact, sports regulators and investigators who conducted the multiple investigations into Russia's doping are based in Canada, and the Olympic leadership in charge of disqualifying athletes is based in Switzerland. It was the former president of that neutral country, Samuel Schmid, who conducted the latest investigation for the Olympic committee, resulting in the Dec. 5 sanctions.
In scrutinizing Russia, sports and anti-doping officials have said they acted on objective forensic and scientific evidence of Russia's fraud: documents, lab analyses and glass bottles of urine with telltale signs of tampering. Just as allies of the special counsel Robert Mueller have done this year in the context of the election inquiry, the officials have defended their impartiality and interest in plain facts.
Three key whistleblowers helped provide those facts: Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia's former longtime chief anti-doping chemist, as well as Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov, a former Russian runner and a former employee of the nation's anti-doping agency. All now live in the United States, in undisclosed locations from which they have spoken openly about years of coordinated cheating. The Justice Department, too, has taken interest in their evidence.
Rodchenkov, whose personal diaries cataloged each day of cheating in Sochi, came to the United States only after Vitaly Mutko - Russia's deputy prime minister and former sports minister - asked him to resign in light of growing global suspicions about the extent of the nation's cheating, which the chemist had helped mastermind.
“Today we also have a meeting, how to come from defensive to offensive,” Rodchenkov wrote to me in an email on Nov. 10, 2015, having initially denied wrongdoing in our early exchanges. At that meeting, Mutko effectively dismissed him and set off a dramatic chain of events: “Freedom!” he wrote in another email that night.
Rodchenkov's tell-all account, reported in the New York Times in May 2016 and detailed in the documentary “Icarus,” culminated in Russia's Olympic ban last week. It was instrumental in motivating some Russian officials to temper their rigid denials and acknowledge that an “institutional conspiracy” had existed, though they maintained it had not been state sponsored.
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