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McLaren, though, said repeatedly on Monday morning that the conclusions of his report were accurate, despite the compressed timeline for its production. (He was appointed in May, after allegations of the hijinks at the Sochi lab were reported by The New York Times and 60 Minutes.) He said he was “supremely confident” in the report and also “unwaveringly confident” in it. Though much of the basis for it was the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow and Sochi labs who was the primary source for the New York Times stories, McLaren said there were other witnesses, some of whom remain confidential, and that his team was able to corroborate elements of Rodchenkov’s allegations. The Russian doctor had said, for example, that the FSB had figured out a way to crack the tamper-proof bottles, and McLaren’s team studied sample bottles and found evidence, he said, of tampering: tiny scratches and marks around the lids that were only evident upon close examination.

“We don’t know how the Russians did it, but we know that they did it,” McLaren said.

The glaring absence from Monday’s presentation was any attempt to identify specific athletes whose samples might have been tampered with, as McLaren said they simply did not have time to do such a thorough accounting. But if the broader allegations are true, that the doping regime was covered up at the highest levels of the sports ministry, that it was, in McLaren’s words, “an intertwined network of state involvement,” then it’s hard to have confidence that any Russian athlete is clean. There were early reports that countries including Canada and the United States would ask the International Olympic Committee to ban all Russian athletes from competing at Rio, and while McLaren refused to comment on such a move, he did say the cover-up “covers the vast majority of sports.”