This Friday, the IOC commission, the one presided over by Denis Oswald, disqualified yet another group of Russian athletes for life. It includes a biathlete, Olga Zaitseva, and two skiers: Anastasia Dotsenko and Yuliya Chekalyova. Their results in Sochi have been annulled. The reason remains the same: alleged doping.
Oswald's commission operates based on the report by Richard McLaren from WADA. McLaren in his turn based his report on the evidence of just a single witness: Grigory Rodchenkov, who's the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, but then fled to the US and started selling scoops to earn his living.
Rodchenkov is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He has already tried to kill himself.
This Tuesday, The New York Times decided to publish fragments of Rodchenkov's journal to make him sound more credible. But it had the opposite effect. The published manuscripts make Rodchenkov seem rather weird.
Here he is buying a chocolate bar for the inspector of the laboratory, Tierry Bogosyan, and writes it down as the main event of the day. Here he's finishing Mutko's plate of grapes.
There go the stories about doping being dissolved in the athletes' martini glasses. Something James-Bondish, no less.
Another funny story tells us about hundreds of samples of old urine being brought to Sochi. The athletes had allegedly been gathering them to replace the test samples. Later, the name-tags on the baby-food jars and the disciplines got all mixed up.
That all sounds like a part of the notorious "Blame Russia" campaign that is being run in the West. At first, it even seems genuine. Those Russians are at it again!
The next Tuesday, on December 5 the IOC will decide whether our team will compete in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Korea. There's already a meme on the Internet: #NoRussiaNoGame.
There will be no games without the Russians.
