The Russian Affair (2020) and The Rodchenkov Affair (2020)

As the 2024 Summer Olympics begin, one team in particular will again be absent.

Russia has been suspended from Olympic competition since 2017 after a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)-initiated commission uncovered systemic doping throughout Russia's elite-level teams. The Russian athletes you will see at the Games this month will be competing as A.I.N.s – Athlètes Individuels Neutres, or Individual Neutral Athletes.

Two must-read books from Russians about Russian doping written in English that I highly recommend reading are The Russian Affair: The True Story of the Couple who Uncovered the Greatest Sporting Scandal, by David Walsh, and The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin’s Secret Doping Empire, by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov.

Reading these books back-to-back is helpful because it allows the reader to grasp what it's like to be an athlete and to enter such a system, and what it's like to be a director and to become that system.

In The Russian Affair, Walsh tells the story of Vitaly and Yuliya Stepanov. Yuliya was an elite 800m runner. Vitaly was a Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) control officer. RUSADA is Russia’s national anti-doping organization, accredited (but now suspended) by WADA. The U.S.-based equivalent is USADA, or U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

During the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Vitaly began communicating with a WADA official about numerous conflict of interests he was witnessing in the field. These descriptions were my favorite part of the book. Sometimes these incidents were specific to his urine-collection responsibilities. For example, the ease with which coaches could bribe doping control officers into not testing certain athletes – even giving them lists of athletes they “could” test. Other times, these examples were of things he saw in the office, such as when Vitaly was tasked with translating English-language anti-doping rules into Russian, and supervisors told him he could leave out certain things that would not be “possible to do in Russia” (p. 42). As a result, 80-page English documents turned into 10-page Russian pamphlets.

There are more examples of institutionalized gall that I won't spoil here. To summarize, they boil down to the integral roles coaches, officials, and other sports stakeholders had in giving athletes banned substances as part of their routine athletic training, and using their connections to sidestep drug testing protocols. (I earlier wrote a blog post about how important it is to understand the importance of connections and the blurred line between Russia's private and public sectors.)

Both The Russian Affair and The Rodchenkov Affair are upfront about how athletes could avoid testing positive. As director, Rodchenkov’s job, as he said in his book’s introduction, “was to make sure that the hundreds of Russian athletes participating in international events were never caught with banned substances.”

Where the texts substantially differ is in who is responsible for wrongdoing. From Vitaly's perspective, Rodchenkov was one of many leaders who were corrupt. He referred to Rodchenkov as “the single most important man in Russia” when it came to anti-doping (p. 18) and said he once had to collect a urine sample from hammer thrower Tatyana Lysenko, who came “from nowhere” to throw a suspicious world-record in July 2005. He said Rodchenkov told him to go with Lysenko to the bathroom to collect the sample. Vitaly said this was against the rules: Only a female official was supposed to collect a sample from a female athlete. Vitaly said Rodchenkov then told him, “he would be happy if Vitaly preferred to limit his supervisory duties to the completion of the doping form and the division of the sample into the A and B bottles” (p. 19). Vitaly retorted that the sample would be invalid if nobody monitors its collection. He said Rodchenkov told him to watch, if he felt the need. After more back and forth, Vitaly said he ended up loitering outside the lavatory door until Lysenko came out with what-should-have-been-an-invalid urine specimen in hand. Yet, neither Rodchenkov nor Vitaly's supervisor as much as batted an eye over it.

Rodchenkov, on the other hand, said he didn't think steroids should be shunned in the first place, and considered WADA staff "naive." "For one thing, they thought that national doping control laboratories actually wanted to do away with doping," Rodchenkov said (p. 85). "Most of the international federations hated doping control, didn’t want to pay for it and viewed the process as an unnecessary headache. Doping control meant scandals, which impacted on a sport’s popularity, sponsors, potential attendances and television revenues" (p. 85).

Vitaly spent years communicating his observations to a WADA official, with seemingly nothing happening. What Vitaly didn't know at the time was that WADA was designed for each nation’s anti-doping agency to regulate cheating within its own country. It was up to RUSADA to catch and to stem doping within Russia. This system had not taken into consideration that RUSADA – or any national anti-doping agency – would proactively help their respective nation’s athletes evade steroid detection and thus, bolster the nation's Olympic medal counts.

After years of what Vitaly perceived as silence and inaction, WADA chief investigative officer Jack Robertson advised the couple to contact award-winning journalist Hajo Seppelt. Seppelt and the Stepanovs agreed to work together to the tell the story, on condition that the Stepanovs would be able to leave Russia before the documentary aired. Seppelt aired the Stepanov's allegations in a 2014 German documentary called The Secrets of Doping: How Russia Makes its Winners. (“Geheimsache Doping Wie Russland seine Sieger macht,” English subtitles available.) Meanwhile, the Stepanovs and their young son left Russia, what-likely-will-be permanently. They lived in Germany for two years after Seppelt’s documentary ran, and at the time of this book's publication, lived in an undisclosed location in the U.S.

Rodchenkov is also somewhere in the U.S. The same month Seppelt’s documentary aired, WADA appointed an independent commission to investigate the Stepanov's allegations. Meanwhile, Rodchenkov happened to be collaborating with Los Angeles-based filmmaker Bryan Fogel on what-started-as a documentary about Fogel’s attempt to expose inadequate drug testing in sport. Fogel sought Rodchenkov’s guidance because he wanted to take performance enhancing drugs while training for the Haute Route Alps amateur bike race, and see if he could evade testing positive. Rodchenkov was guiding Fogel regarding what to take, how much, and when.

As Seppelt's documentary aired and this scandal unfolded, RUSADA former managing director Nikita Kamaev and general director Vyacheslav Sinev both died suddenly, under suspicious circumstances. Fearful for Rodchenkov, Fogel offered Rodchenkov an airplane ticket to the U.S., and Rodchenkov accepted – bringing his laptop and office hard drive with him.

He would later give files on these devices to U.S. Department of Justice officials, and to Rebecca Ruiz and Michael Schwirtz from the New York Times, who wrote about it in this May 12, 2016, piece. Fogel’s documentary turned into an Academy-Award-winning documentary called Icarus.

Ultimately, the aforementioned commission found “beyond a reasonable doubt” that multiple Russian government agencies, plus the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow that Rodchenkov ran, had “operated for the protection of doped Russian athletes” within a “state-directed failsafe system” using “the disappearing positive [test] methodology.” (I enclosed links to the WADA reports: Part I and Part II.)

Another thing the books have in common is how fearful and unpredictable Rodchenkov and the Stepanovs' lives have become in the aftermath. As far as I know, Rodchenkov remains in witness protection and the Stepanovs still live in an undisclosed location, both within the U.S. And though the Stepanovs applied for asylum in 2016, they are still waiting for their application to be processed, according to University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Professor of Sports Management Spencer Harris.

That's a long time time to wonder if they're going to be forced to return to the country on whom they blew whistles.

That should be concerning. Such a fearful predicament hardly encourages people to come forward with information about rule breaking within their sport.

And we need them to do so. There is plenty of corruption to go around, in multiple sports, in multiple countries.

“There needs to be more support for whistleblowers,” said Global Athlete Director General and former WADA deputy director general Rob Koehler in this April 4 Play the Game article by Lars Jorgensen. “They lose everything to expose the truth, yet they struggle to get assistance.

“If whistleblowers are not protected and supported, why would anyone come forward?”