Fat Cat wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2020 5:50 pm
I get your point but Russia took it several steps further than that by a creating a coordinated effort by RUSADA, Ministry of Sport, Federal Security Service, and the Center for Sports Preparation of the National Teams of Russia. The investigation by WADA, led by a Canadian, found that Russia had "operated for the protection of doped Russian athletes" within a "state-directed failsafe system" using "the disappearing positive [test] methodology." The investigation found that Russia had used the "Disappearing Positive Methodology" on more than 643 positive samples, at minimum, and that Russia had further blocked access to records that may have substantiated hundreds more.
Now, if your argument is that other individuals and countries cheat, I agree. But if your argument is that Russia wasn't doing anything that other countries don't do, you're wrong.
The investigation by a Canadian was a dud. The sequel to that story was completely ignored by the big media. I would recommend reading the whole thing, but below are some highlights.
https://www.thenation.com/article/congr ... eats-time/
This new investigation became the so-called “Independent Person” Report, the independent person (IP) being a Canadian law professor named Richard McLaren.The IP finished his new report, which covers numerous athletes over multiple years, in only 57 days. One explanation for this extraordinary speed on such a complex report is that he questioned no Russian officials. Although some might have wondered about the lack of balance caused by this failure, his report was greeted with great fanfare by the Times and by international media, which did not question—despite vehement denials by Russia and the Russian athletes—the IP’s conclusion of Russian state-sponsored doping based on, as McLaren later put it, “immutable facts.” The report—despite, as described below, its fatal flaws—ultimately led to the banning of hundreds of Russian Olympic and Paralympic athletes, from Rio and PyeongChang combined, without hearings to prove their individual guilt.
The investigation and the report by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, dismissed the Canadian results.
Not only was Rodchenkov cross-examined for the first time at the CAS hearings, but so was McLaren. The results were devastating. Despite that devastation—or perhaps because of it—these CAS decisions are not well known, primarily for one reason: the paltry coverage of the Times, especially compared to the countless column inches the Times had devoted to the now-discredited accounts of Rodchenkov and McLaren regarding the involvement of individual athletes in the doping scandal.
The French professor utterly failed in this task. First, according to the published CAS decisions, there was no evidence about what the Russians allegedly did to open the bottles. The expert “conceded that his team had ‘no idea’ what tools were actually used by any individuals who tampered with the Sochi samples,” i.e., he was engaging in guesswork on what tools to use and how to use them.
Second, the forensic professor admitted that the conditions under which his team opened the bottles were drastically different from what happened in Sochi. For example, in the professor’s work, the bottles were closed only partially, and the bottles were empty, not full with urine as they would have been in Sochi. These two facts together are particularly significant because the French professor did not know whether the bottles in Sochi were turned upside down to perform the opening, and he admitted to the panel that the bottles can leak if they are only partially closed. Of course, the bottles were not empty at Sochi at the relevant time, so there is no purpose at all—no probative value—to open empty bottles, as the French professor did.
More important, there is absolutely no evidence at all that the bottles in Sochi were not fully closed, per the manufacturer’s instructions. The athletes were supposed to close the bottles initially, and this closure had to be double-checked by WADA Drug Control Officers (DCOs). Therefore, for Rodchenkov’s story to work, the DCOs would have to be co-conspirators in the alleged state-sponsored doping scheme. As the CAS decisions noted, “The Panel did not find any support for the suggestion advanced by the IOC, that the DCOs at the doping control stations could potentially be involved by allowing the athletes not to fully close their sample bottles.”
), but the whole affair seems quite interesting. 
