A Russian official has admitted for the first time the existence of a doping campaign that involved hundreds of the country’s athletes.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director of Russia’s national anti-doping agency Rusada, told the New York Times on Tuesday. The government’s top officials were not involved, however, Antseliovich said.

Second McLaren report: five questions on the Russian doping scandal Read more

Rusada said on Wednesday that Antseliovich’s comments had been distorted and taken out of context. A statement given to the Tass news agency said the impression had wrongly been given that its leadership recognised there had been an “institutional conspiracy”.

The Kremlin said it would check the veracity of the NYT report to make sure Antseliovich had been accurately quoted. “We are not inclined to consider this information as first hand,” said its spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “The accuracy of these words first needs to be checked.”

The report details how the director of one laboratory tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided performance-enhancing drugs to athletes. The operation was assisted by the Federal Security Service and a deputy sports minister.

Russia has long denied such an operation existed. But a report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) asserted this month that more than 1,000 Russians athletes across more than 30 sports – were involved in or benefited from state-sponsored doping between 2011 and 2015. The report, authored by a Canadian law professor, Richard McLaren, said the London 2012 Olympics were “corrupted on an unprecedented scale” due to Russian doping.



After the McLaren report’s publication, the International Olympic Committee said it had opened disciplinary proceedings against 28 Russian athletes who competed at the 2014 Games in Sochi. An IOC statement read: “At this point in time, these 28 new cases are not AAFs [adverse analytical findings], like a positive doping test. However, the manipulation of the samples themselves could lead to an anti-doping rule violation and sanctions.”

