Posted on 02/19/2022 8:23:29 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Grigory Rodchenkov was head of Russia’s ‘anti-doping’ centre but, in 2015, he fled to the US...
The super-lab’s name is a misnomer. As Rodchenkov recounts in a gripping memoir, The Rodchenkov Affair, he ran Russia’s doping programme. He developed a novel drugs cocktail to help his country win. It featured three nearly undetectable anabolic steroids. Athletes swished it around the mouth, mixed with Chivas Royal or vermouth.
Russia’s state-sponsored doping operation was a highly sophisticated affair, refined over many years. And a successful one. Moscow cheated its way to medals in successive international competitions. They included the 2012 London Olympics, the “dirtiest in history”, according to Rodchenkov. The fraud reached its apogee at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, hosted by Putin and a moment of patriotic pride.
How much did the Russian president know? According to Rodchenkov, the lot. “He knew about this operation. He was informed on a regular basis, yes,” he says. After each doping episode, Russia’s sports minister Vitaly Mutko – a simple loyalist, in the book – would pop in and brief the president. Typically, Putin would ask if there was anything Mutko needed. “The state’s role is absolutely clear,” Rodchenkov says.
In the cold war, doping was rife across the Soviet bloc. Rodchenkov recalls how as a promising student athlete he first took performance-enhancing drugs in 1981, while sitting on the sofa of his Moscow apartment. His mother, a medic, injected a steroid called retabolil into his right buttock. “The drug felt intoxicating. I could feel energy pouring into my gluteus maximus, the most powerful muscle in a runner’s body,” he writes.
Rodchenkov read chemistry at Moscow State University. In the mid-1980s he got a job at the USSR’s doping- control lab. He thrived there....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Could be, but now that we allow men to pretend they’re woman athletes, I am unable and unwilling to give a damn.
Could be worse, could be the Clintons.
And yet, he is still alive....
They must cheat and deceive to extol the virtues of the communist system.
That should tell the world all they need to know about that system.
Much like faking temperature data to support the global warming theory.
Sigh.
One more item to add to the Why The Olympics Is A Joke list and possibly to the Why You Need To See A Psychiatrist First If You Want Your Daughter To Participate In Organized Athletics list.
Olympics Is A Joke List Item #1: Hitler (you know, that skinny, pale, little freak with the funny mustache?) was the originator of the Olympics we know today.
Fascinating behind the scenes doping intrigue. What we never knew....
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