LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Various sports officials and antidoping investigators have drawn far-reaching conclusions based on the claims made by Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia’s former top sports chemist.
Rodchenkov described dark-of-night cheating at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and systematic doping schemes stretching across several years. All of that was corroborated sufficiently, Olympic officials ruled this week, to justify levying an unprecedented penalty for doping — the barring of Russia from the 2018 Winter Games.
But one of Rodchenkov’s indirect allegations — sourced to a memo he wrote to the attention of Russia’s sports minister in 2015 — resulted in a cloud of suspicion around a fellow chemist, Martial Saugy of Switzerland, for which Rodchenkov is now apologizing.