Former IAAF president Lamine Diack arrested - allegedly took bribes to cover-up Russian doping

[Rob2012]

French authorities say former IAAF President Lamine Diack has been placed under investigation on corruption and money-laundering charges.

Diack, who stepped down in August after 16 years in charge of track and field's governing body, is suspected of taking money from Russia to hide positive doping tests.

The French office that handles financial prosecutions says a legal adviser to Diack, Habib Cisse, also was placed under investigation by judges acting on evidence provided by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The office also says that Gabriel Dolle, who was the director of the IAAF's anti-doping department, has been taken into custody in the south of France.

http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/prosecutors-iaaf-president-diack-investigation-34957869

[baron-pierreIV]

See? Track & Field is as riddled with drug cheats as Boxing.

Ban T&Field. Just close down the sport!!

[Rob2012]

This is potentially more serious than the FIFA's problems if they can prove this.

French authorities investigating former IAAF President Lamine Diack now say one of his sons was also "very active" in an alleged "system of corruption" that sought to blackmail athletes, with demands of money to hush-up suspected doping.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, France's national financial prosecutor said investigators have verified that Lamine Diack, who presided for nearly 16 years at track and field's governing body, pocketed "more than 1 million euros" ($1.1 million) from the alleged cash-for-silence scheme.

Evidence from the World Anti-Doping Agency that triggered the French probe suggests that a Turkish athlete, as well as athletes from Russia, was a victim of a blackmail attempt allegedly involving Diack's family, prosecutor Eliane Houlette said in the AP interview in her Paris office.

According to WADA's findings, at least one of Diack's sons approached Turkish runner Asli Cakir Alptekin a few months after she won gold in the 1,500 meters at the 2012 London Olympics and suggested she could pay to quash a doping positive.

"It was a sort of blackmail," Houlette said. "She refused."

Alptekin was subsequently banned for eight years, for the second anti-doping rule violation of her career, and forfeited her gold in a settlement with the IAAF concluded in August this year.

"This athlete's case figures in the report that the World Anti-Doping Agency gave us," Houlette told the AP. But Alptekin hasn't yet been interviewed by three French investigating magistrates now seeking to determine exactly how many athletes were approached, how much they paid and whether the elder Diack, in his role as IAAF president, simply turned a blind eye or was an active organizer.

....

At least six athletes, for the moment seemingly mostly Russians, are thought to have been told that their suspected doping could be hushed up, allowing them to continue competing, if they paid.

"It's a form of blackmail when you say to someone: 'Pay or you can't compete,'" said Houlette. "I don't know if we can call it a mafia system but it is a system of corruption. It's extremely serious."

Asked how much Diack senior is believed to have pocketed, she replied: "From what we've verified, it is more than 1 million euros and this money seemingly transmitted through the Russian athletics federation."

"Because the investigations have just started, we cannot affirm that all this money came from payments from Russian athletes," she said. "What is certain is that Mr. Cisse, the legal adviser to Mr. Diack, traveled to Russia and gave to the Russian federation the list of Russian athletes suspected of doping and, in exchange for sums of money, these athletes weren't sanctioned."

....

The French probe and allegations against Diack are severe early tests for the presidency of his successor at the IAAF, Sebastian Coe. With football officials at FIFA also facing criminal probes in the United States and Switzerland, two of the most powerful governing bodies, supposed guardians for two of the most popular sports, are now operating under dark clouds.

More @ http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7e08572a3f85438d8ec1bcb52e944eb9/apnewsbreak-diack-son-very-active-iaaf-corruption

[gotosy]

Russia should be banned from track and field, WADA panel says

GENEVA (AP) — WADA’s independent commission says Russia’s athletics federation should be suspended and its track and field athletes banned from competition until the country cleans up its act on doping.

The commission recommends that the World Anti-Doping Agency immediately declare the Russian federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition.

The report recommends that the International Olympic Committee not accept any entries from the Russian federation until the body has been declared complaint with the code and the suspension has been lifted.

Such a decision could keep Russian athletes out of next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

But the WADA report says “timely action” by Russian authorities “should mean that no significant competitions will be missed.”

MORE: Read the full WADA report

The WADA commission says Russian Sports Ministry Vitaly Mutko issued direct orders to “manipulate particular samples.”

Mutko denied wrongdoing to the WADA inquiry panel, including knowledge of athletes being blackmailed and FSB intelligence agents interfering in lab work.

Mutko, who is also a FIFA executive committee member and leads the 2018 World Cup organizing committee, was interviewed by the WADA panel at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich on Sept. 22.

His ministry is cited in the report for asserting undue influence over the Moscow lab.

Mutko did tell the WADA inquiry he was “disgusted with the whistleblowers” who made claims of corruption.

The report says Mutko “does not believe their allegations and says they had no right to make the recordings and that such tapings are matters for the public prosecutors.”

The commission looking into widespread doping in Russian athletics has recommended lifetime bans for five Russian middle-distance runners and five Russian coaches and administrators.

The commission said that the London Olympics were more or less sabotaged by allowing Russian athletes to compete when they should have been suspended for doping violations.

They blamed what they called an inexplicable laissez-faire attitude toward anti-doping by the IAAF and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.

The World Anti-Doping Agency sent the recommendations for the lifetime suspensions to the IAAF in August and made them public today with release of a 350-page report detailing the allegations.

The WADA reports says agents from Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, infiltrated anti-doping work at the Sochi Olympics.

The report says “impartiality, judgment and integrity were compromised by the surveillance of the FSB within the laboratory.”

One witness told the inquiry that “in Sochi, we had some guys pretending to be engineers in the lab but actually they were from the federal security service.”

The inquiry says this was part of a wider pattern of “direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state with the Moscow laboratory operations.”

Staff at the Moscow lab believed their offices were bugged by the FSB.

An FSB agent, thought to be Evgeniy Blotkin or Blokhin, regularly visited.

The report says lab director Grigory Rodchenkov was required to meet with Blotkin/Blokhin weekly to update him on the “mood of WADA.”

The WADA report says Moscow testing laboratory director Grigory Rodchenko ordered 1,417 doping control samples destroyed to deny evidence for the inquiry.

The inquiry report says Rodchenko “personally instructed and authorized” the destruction of evidence three days before a WADA audit team arrived in Moscow last December.

The WADA panel says it wanted to send the Russian athletes’ samples to labs in other countries to detect banned drugs and doping methods.

The report says Rodchenko’s action “obliterated forever the attempt to determine if there was any evidence of athletes having clean and dirty ‘A’ samples at the Moscow laboratory.”

When the auditors arrived in Moscow, Rodchenko told them he decided to “do some clean up to prepare for WADA’s visit.”

Rodchenkov, the report notes, “remained obstructive” throughout the investigation and refused to be recorded.

The WADA commission wants the agency to strip accreditation from the Moscow laboratory and fire lab director Grigory Rodchenko.

The report says the “Moscow laboratory is unable to act independently,” citing interference from government agencies, including the FSB secret service.

The report says Rodchenko is “an aider and abettor of the doping activities” and “at the heart of the positive drug test cover-up.”

Rodchenko was key to “the conspiracy to extort money from athletes in order to cover up positive doping test results.”

In one case, he was paid indirectly by an athlete, who turned whistleblower, to hide a failed doping test. The cash courier was “a known performance-enhancing substances trafficker.”

Under Rodchenko’s leadership, “many tests that the laboratory has conducted should be considered highly suspect.”

The Moscow lab oversaw testing for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and is due to work on FIFA’s anti-doping program for the 2018 World Cup.

The WADA commission suspects Russia has been using an obscure laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow to help cover up widespread doping, possibly by pre-screening athletes’ doping samples and ditching those that test positive.

It says whistleblowers and confidential witnesses “corroborated that this second laboratory is involved in the destruction and the cover-up of what would otherwise be positive doping tests.”

It says the “Laboratory of the Moscow Committee of Sport for Identification for Prohibited Substances in Athlete Samples” is controlled by the Moscow city government and operates in an industrial zone about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the city center.

It says this laboratory “could be used as a first step to identify test samples of Russian athletes who have suspicious or positive urine samples” and that “pre-screened samples that were not positive could then be sent to the accredited laboratory,” also in Moscow.

It says the Russian anti-doping agency and Russian athletics federation must know about the lab, stating “it is not credible to believe” that they didn’t.

AP

http://olympics.nbcsports.com/2015/11/09/russia-track-and-field-doping-wada-report/

[Fox334]

Not surprising, but disappointing. That report is incredibly damning.

[Rob2012]

Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko says they may withdraw funding from anti-doping in response to WADA report

Logic 101

[LatinXTC]

So could this mean we will be seeing Russian athletes stripped of their medals from the 2012 summer games, 2014 winter games, and the 2013 world athletics championships??? Ooh, and maybe even the world aquatics championship in Kazan? Oh please say yes let's humiliate the douchebags even further! And lifetime bans for all of them!!!

[StefanMUC]

So could this mean we will be seeing Russian athletes stripped of their medals from the 2012 summer games, 2014 winter games, and the 2013 world athletics championships??? Ooh, and maybe even the world aquatics championship in Kazan? Oh please say yes let's humiliate the douchebags even further! And lifetime bans for all of them!!!

It just refers to IAAF, i.e. Athletics, but it's good to see them exposed like that.

[Olympian2004]

Regardless of the final outcome, this is a massive blow to Russia's sport scene - and Mutko's reaction speaks for itself. It's exactly the wrong response to a problem that has been blatantly obvious in recent years. And that problem doesn't stop at the borders of the Russian track and field scene and not even at the borders of Russia. This could only be the beginning for further revelations also regarding Russian athletes from other sports and/or athletes from other nations. And so this is somewhat worrying for the whole sports world as well.

In general, the sports world is very much in turmoil these days: While Russia and world athletics are increasingly immersed in doping allegations, world football is in a deep crisis as well. German FA president Wolfgang Niersbach just resigned today after allegations that the German FA paid 6.7 million euros to then-Adidas boss Robert Louis Dreyfus in order to bribe the Asian FIFA executive committee members in the lead-up to the 2006 World Cup host country decision. So it's very unappetitzing and alarming which kind of news are produced by world sports currently.

[LatinXTC]

It just refers to IAAF, i.e. Athletics, but it's good to see them exposed like that.

Yes I'm aware it's just those athletes, but this is like opening pandora's box, all it takes is one thing and all sorts of crap start coming out of it.

Oh the irony that the stupid little Russian twat Viktoria Komova made the steroid comment during the world gymnastics championship, when Russians in other sports are now being questioned on their test results. Someone should find her and ask her what she thinks of this lol

[Mainad]

I shudder to think what's coming next!

I'm beginning to wonder who exactly the decent, honest members of world sport are? Are they still in the majority or rapidly becoming an endangered minority???

[arwebb]

For anyone who loves sport, and particularly for anyone who loves athletics, today has been a very depressing day. The fact we've known it was coming for a while doesn't make the scale of what has been uncovered, or the implications of it, any easier to comprehend. Nor should we be under any illusions about the threat this crisis poses, not simply to athletics, but to sport as a whole. If people don't feel they can believe what they are watching, then the sport is dead and that is the very real risk facing athletics tonight.

Perhaps we should not be all that surprised. I've just listened to Steve Cram on BBC Radio talking about how he first talked about Russian athletes cheating at the age of 17. He's now 55. As I drove home earlier, I was reminded of the occasion when Paula Radcliffe held up an anti-doping banner at the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton, triggered by a Russian athlete getting away with failing a drugs test, and having it removed by security personnel. Maybe something like this has been coming all along.

There are two very real fears for me. One is that, if one nation is doing it in one sport, what is to stop other nations doing it in this or other sports? I fear the answer to that is not much. The other is that, given the extent to which the IAAF has been implicated in today's report, how can any of us realistically trust that body, under a president in Lord Coe who has been part of the senior hierarchy for a long time, to sort it out? I'm trying to find a reason why people can trust a leader who, just three months ago, described media reporting of drug problems in athletics as "a declaration of war" on his sport and I'm not sure there's a logical one. The only one I can remotely cling to is his record of delivery in other phases of his career. He took on the biggest challenge of his professional life when he was elected IAAF president. That challenge has just become so much harder.

[gotosy]

Diack resigns as honorary member of International Olympic Committee

Lamine Diack has resigned as an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee following his arrest on corruption charges last week.

The 82-year-old Senegalese had been suspended by the IOC yesterday following an emergency meeting of its ruling Executive Board.

French police are currently investigating Diack over allegations he took bribes to cover up positive drugs tests involving Russian athletics when he was President of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

Earlier, he had resigned as President of the International Athletics Foundation (IAF), the charitable arm of the IAAF, which he had headed since 1999.

Diack had retained his position of the organisation - whose honorary President is Prince Albert II of Monaco - despite stepping down as head of the IAAF in August, when he was replaced by Britain's Sebastian Coe.

...

http://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1031591/diack-resigns-as-honorary-member-of-international-olympic-committee