The International Olympic Committee considers Tuesday whether to ban all Russian teams from competing in next month’s Olympics in Brazil over allegations of an elaborate doping scheme.

The IOC’s executive board is convening a conference call a day after the World Anti-Doping Agency released an independent report citing widespread, state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

WADA called for the IOC to ban all Russian athletes and officials from the summer games in Brazil.

Russian track and field athletes have already been banned from international competition by their governing body.

In a statement Monday, the IOC said it would “carefully study the complex and detailed allegations, in particular with regard to the Russian Ministry of Sport.

“The IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organization implicated,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his minister of sport Monday pending an investigation, but also cast doubt on the integrity of the WADA report.

 

“The allegations against Russian athletes are built on the testimony of one – a person with a scandalous reputation,” the Russian leader said in a statement issued on the Kremlin’s official website.

 

Putin also noted that much like the Soviet and American boycotts of past Olympics, politics was again at the forefront of the current Russian doping scandal.

 

“Yes, the forms of interference have changed but the result is the same: to make sport an instrument of geopolitical pressure, forming a negative impression of a country and people.”

Lead WADA investigator Richard McLaren told reporters Monday that evidence shows a Moscow laboratory “operated, for the protection of doped Russian athletes, within a state-dictated failsafe system.”

He said findings showed that efforts to mask the doping were coordinated by Russia’s state-run Center of Sports Preparation, and that athletes were instructed in how to manipulate results of routine urine testing designed to detect such abuses in international competition.

Controversy erupted earlier this year when Moscow’s former Anti-Doping Laboratory Head Grigory Rodchenkov told The New York Times that dozens of Russian athletes used performance enhancing drugs in Sochi with approval of national sports authorities.

Monday, investigator McLaren characterized Rodchenkov’s accusations as “widely credible.”

Shortly after Rodchenkov’s allegations were published in May, Putin voiced support for the WADA probe.

But weeks later, he argued publicly against a complete ban on all Russian athletes, saying such a move would also penalize many athletes “who have nothing to do with violations.”

 

Putin also noted Russia remained committed to anti-doping regulations and fair competition.

 

Yet, even ahead of Monday’s WADA commission report, Russian officials poured suspicion on the WADA commission’s independence, noting calls from the U.S. and nine other countries’ anti-doping agencies for Russia’s outright suspension if the McLaren report found Russia guilty of wrongdoing.

 

“It gives the impression that parts of this were all part of a planned and preconceived campaign aimed at disqualifying Russian athletes from participating” in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, no matter the evidence necessary to take such an unprecedented decision,” wrote Russian Olympic Committee chief Alexander Zhukov in a letter to IOC chief Thomas Bach.
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