95 of 96 individual athletes named in the McLaren Report will not be sanctioned with anti-doping rule violations after their nations’ anti-doping organizations could not find enough evidence to prove a violation.
That news comes courtesy of the New York Times, which published an excerpt from an internal WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) report last week. The report says the 96 athletes represent 9 different sports. Those 96 athletes were named in the McLaren Reports of 2016, in which independent investigator Richard McLaren told WADA he had uncovered evidence of a massive state-sponsored doping program within Russia that included compromised samples tested in the Moscow WADA lab during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. The second report alleged that the program continued past those 2014 Olympics.
The report implicated several athletes whom McLaren’s report suggested could have had positive tests covered up in an elaborate process of sample-switching allegedly used to protect certain athletes from failing tests. However, the New York Times report says all of the information pertaining to the named athletes was provided to “relevant Anti-Doping Organizations,” but that in 95 of the 96 cases, those authorities found that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge individual athletes with anti-doping rules violations.
There was one case where sanctions will be brought. The report doesn’t name the athlete or sport, but indicates that a re-test of samples from the Moscow lab did show the presence of a banned substance and represented enough evidence to charge the athlete.
The internal WADA report also suggests that independent federations (like FIVB for volleyball) could also order re-analysis of stored samples and that the IOC is doing re-testing of its own.
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