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Russia 2018 boss Alexey Sorokin says doping claims are ‘made-up news’

However, world football’s governing body FIFA has confirmed that the story is correct.

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Russia 2018 boss Alexey Sorokin has dismissed a newspaper report that the Russian squad from the 2014 World Cup is under a FIFA investigation for doping as “made-up news”.

This is despite world football’s governing body confirming that the Mail on Sunday report was correct.

The story is based on the 34 footballers identified in Professor Richard McLaren’s 2016 report into Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme, which involved more than 1,000 athletes from over 30 sports.

The governing bodies of each of those sports have been sent all of the evidence McLaren and his team uncovered, and are currently supposed to be working through with a view to pursuing anti-doping cases against individual athletes.

In a statement, a FIFA spokesperson “simply confirmed that, in close collaboration with (the World Anti-Doping Agency), it is still investigating the allegations involving football players in the so-called McLaren report”.

FIFA would not, however, refer to any particular players as it is a live investigation, although the spokesperson said it is in FIFA’s interest to resolve the issue as soon as possible, before adding that all tests done on Russian players at the 2014 World Cup and ongoing Confederations Cup have been negative.

Professor Richard McLaren
Thirty-four footballers were identified in Professor Richard McLaren’s 2016 report into Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme (Jonathan Brady/PA)

But speaking at a press conference in St Petersburg to mark the end of the World Cup warm-up event’s group stages, the chief executive of the organising committee for Russia 2018 took a page out of United States president Donald Trump’s book and rejected the story out of hand.

When asked by a reporter what his first reaction was to reading the story, Sorokin said: “My first emotion to the Mail on Sunday focusing on such issues was that the (Confederations Cup) must be going well because they are focusing on things from the past.

“It’s very bizarre this is appearing now – it’s clear it’s made-up news. We have received confirmation from FIFA that the players have been tested pre- and post-match and all results have been negative.

“Most of the players play regularly in European competitions with their clubs and, in general, there hasn’t been a positive test in Russian football for many years. So we don’t consider this to be a serious matter and it’s very strange that it’s in the papers.”

Russia
Although Russia’s World Cup squad from 2014 is under investigation, FIFA confirmed that all tests on the players at the tournament came back negative (Adam Davy/Empics)

When told by reporters the issue is not whether players have tested positive but whether they have been named by McLaren as beneficiaries of the sample-swapping scam run by the Russian anti-doping agency and Moscow laboratory between 2011 and 2015, Sorokin attacked McLaren’s main witness, Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of that laboratory.

“It’s speculation that has appeared on the basis of an incredible witness,” Sorokin said.

Fearing for his life, Rodchenkov fled Russia in January 2016 and is now living in hiding in America as part of the federal government’s witness protection scheme.

But this was not before he had a chance to tell his remarkable story to a handful of reporters, documentary-makers and anti-doping investigators, the most significant of these being McLaren, who was then able to corroborate Rodchenkov’s claims from other witnesses and forensic evidence.

The most stunning revelation was how Rodchenkov and the Russian sports ministry masterminded the sabotage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi by using a secret service agent to swap dirty samples from Russian athletes for clean ones – collected months before – through a hole in the laboratory wall.

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