The former executive director of Russia’s anti-doping agency has died two months after resigning from his post during Russia’s doping scandal, the second death of a former senior official in recent weeks.

A spokeswoman for Rusada, the anti-doping agency, confirmed that Nikita Kamayev died on Sunday. “The preliminary cause of death was a massive heart attack,” the agency said in a statement, adding that he was “an experienced and understanding manager who was distinguished by his high level of professionalism.”

The former Rusada general director Ramil Khabriev told the Tass news agency he believed Kamayev, 52, had a heart attack after cross-country skiing.

“I’ve been told that he was out cross-country skiing, came home, and felt pain in the area of the heart,” Khabriev said. “I’d never heard him complain of anything to do with his heart. Perhaps his wife knew about some sort of problem.”

The acting director of Rusada, Anna Antseliovich, told state news agency R-Sport: “This is a big loss and surprise for us. He never complained about his heart and wasn’t sick.”

Kamayev led Rusada from March 2011 to December 2015, when he and the rest of the organisation’s leadership resigned following a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) that exposed widespread state-sponsored cheating and corruption.



World athletics’ governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), indefinitely suspended Russia from all competitions in November following the report, putting the country’s participation in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in jeopardy.

Kamayev’s death follows that of Vyacheslav Sinev, the agency’s general director between 2008 and 2010, who died on 3 February from causes that are still unknown.

Kamayev criticised the Wada commission’s report for being “politicised”, saying that it had produced a biased report based on unreliable testimony from athletes who had been caught doping, and that in any case, Rusada had been fighting drug use effectively.



The report found that Rusada had delayed reporting of doping test results; warned Russian athletes in advance of surprise tests, and allowed athletes suspected of doping to keep competing; tainting the results of competitions including the 2012 London Olympics. Rusada officials even accepted bribes from athletes before testing, the report said.



A second part of the report in January raised suspicions that former IAAF head Lamine Diack worked with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to resolve doping cases without properly punishing athletes.

The Russian sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, paid tribute to Kamaev for having “created” Russia’s anti-doping system. “It’s a very unexpected death. The man seemed healthy and everything was fine,” he told R-Sport.



