RIO DE JANEIRO — Most of the key figures involved in Russia’s elaborate doping scheme at the 2014 Sochi Olympics will not participate in the Rio Games. The lab director who blew the whistle is living in the United States, and implicated government officials were told not to attend.
A central figure in their schemes, however, has found its way here: the supposedly tamper-proof drug-testing bottle that Russian officials manipulated to evade doping violations. Berlinger, the Swiss manufacturer of the Sochi bottles, has supplied the drug-testing lab for the Rio Games with thousands of its latest bottles.
“It’s a really big problem for the Olympics, because we rely on the fact that those bottles can’t be tampered with,” said Don Catlin, a former member of the Olympic medical commission that selected the Berlinger bottles in the late 1990s.