The International Olympic Committee has begun disciplinary proceedings against 28 Russian athletes who competed at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, acting on evidence that their urine samples were tampered with, and making it all but certain that Russia will lose its first-place standing in the medals table from those Games.
The proceedings, announced Friday, were prompted by a report published two weeks earlier by the World Anti-Doping Agency that concluded that the Russian authorities had switched the samples of at least a dozen Russian medalists in Sochi to conceal the athletes’ use of banned performance-enhancing drugs.