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Athletics and Russian sport will be attacked on Monday when a report is published concerning allegations of blackmail and doping scams.
Olympic sports will be bracing for severe damage when a World Anti-Doping Agency inquiry delivers findings into claims of top officials’ complicity in extorting athletes and concealing drug cheats.
Longtime IAAF president Lamine Diack was last week put under criminal suspicion of corruption and money laundering by French prosecutors acting on evidence provided by the WADA-appointed inquiry team. The 82-year-old Senegalese left office in August after 16 years.
“This report is going to be a real game-changer for sport,” said Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer who sits on the three-member inquiry team chaired by IOC veteran Dick Pound.
“This is a whole different scale of corruption than the FIFA scandal or the IOC scandal in respect to Salt Lake City,” McLaren said in comments published by Western University in Canada, where he is a professor of law.
The Pound panel will present some findings at a news conference on Monday in Geneva though details of the French case will not be published.
Russia will be targeted by the report just over two years since Moscow hosted the 2013 track and field world championships, and less than two years since the Sochi Winter Games.
WADA formed the independent inquiry after German broadcaster ARD aired a documentary – “Top secret doping: How Russia makes its winners?” – last December. It alleged systematic doping across athletics and other summer and winter Olympic sports.
The program implicated officials in Russia’s athletics federation, anti-doping agency (RUSADA) and WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow in acts of bribery to hush up positive doping tests, falsify tests and supply banned drugs.
ARD alleged that former Chicago Marathon winner Liliya Shobukhova paid 450,000 euros ($A686,000) to Russian officials linked to then-IAAF treasurer Valentin Balakhnichev, who threatened her with a doping ban before the London Games.
When Shobukhova was banned for two years in 2014, her husband received a 300,000 ($A457,000) refund payment linked to Balakhnichev, the program said.
McLaren suggested the allegations are more serious than FIFA bribery cases which did not affect the outcome of World Cup matches.
“Unlike FIFA where you have a bunch of old men who put a whole lot of extra money in their pockets, here you potentially have a bunch of old men who put a whole lot of extra money in their pockets – through extortion and bribes – but also caused significant changes to actual results and final standings of international athletics competitions,” McLaren said.
The Moscow lab oversaw testing for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and is scheduled to lead the anti-doping program for FIFA when Russia hosts the 2018 World Cup.
Pound’s panel will deliver an interim report Monday while it continues to investigate allegations of widespread blood doping from 2001 to 2012 based on a second ARD documentary in August.
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