CHEATERS

Russian Officials Admit to Olympic Doping Operation

No longer deny operation existed, but say it wasn’t state-sponsored.

Russian officials admitted to The New York Times that they carried out a widespread doping operation that affected the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, the paper reported Tuesday. One official told the Times “[i]t was an institutional conspiracy,” and the paper detailed how “[a] lab director tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs, corrupting some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. Members of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB, broke into sample bottles holding urine. And a deputy sports minister for years ordered coverups of top athletes’ use of banned substances.” The officials interviewed by the Times, however, denied that the doping operation was at all state-sponsored.