Russia disputes new claims of ‘institutional conspiracy’ involving Olympic athletes, doping

Russia pushed back Wednesday after its top anti-doping official was quoted as conceding that an “institutional conspiracy” enabled its athletes to cheat during the 2014 Sochi Olympics and other international sports competitions.

The supposed admission — Moscow’s first with respect to allegations of a wide-scale doping scandal — was attributed to Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, RUSADA, and appeared in an article published Tuesday by The New York Times.

Reporting from Moscow, the Times said that several Russian officials including Ms. Antseliovich admitted the existence of a conspiracy implicating members of the Federal Security Service — the former KGB — as well as a deputy sports minister and some of the nation’s top athletes, once and for all owning to doping accusations that erupted in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Following its publication, however, officials from RUSADA and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office alike have refuted the Times report.

“We categorically deny it,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday. “We are not inclined to consider this information as firsthand. The accuracy of these words first needs to be checked.”

Even Ms. Antseliovich, the anti-doping official quoted by The Times, claimed afterwards that the newspaper had “changed” what she said, CNN reported Wednesday.

In a statement, RUSADA said Ms. Antseliovich’s words were “distorted and taken out of context” by the newspaper.

“We’d like to stress that RUSADA does not have and cannot have authority to admit or deny such facts. Russia’s Investigative Committee is conducting an investigation into the matter,” the statement said.

The New York Times first reported on the existence of a wide-scale Russian doping conspiracy in May upon interviewing a former lab director intimately aware the operation. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) hired an investigator later that month to review the allegations further, and later determined that state-sponsored doping had enabled hundreds of Russian athletes to compete in international games while on banned performance-enhancing drugs.

The International Olympic Committee barred more than 100 Russian athletes from competing in the 2016 Summer Olympics as a result of the findings contained in the WADA-commissioned investigation, and an update to that report released earlier this month found that more than 1,000 Russian athletes across 30 sports had benefited from the “systematic and centralized coverup.”