MOSCOW (AP) — Russia faces expulsion from the marquee track and field events at next year's Olympics after a World Anti-Doping Agency report accused it of operating a vast state-sponsored doping program.
The WADA commission's 350-page report accuses Russia and international sports authorities of an array of misdeeds - a mass cover-up of doping tests, allowing top athletes to compete at the London 2012 Olympics when they should have been suspended, even that Russian security services infiltrated an Olympic drug test lab.
Much of the investigation was based on reporting in a documentary by German TV network ARD in December 2014, which featured undercover recordings of candid doping discussions.
Montreal-based WADA's 3-man Independent Commission which produced the report was made up of Chair and former WADA President Dick Pound, law professor Richard McLaren and Gunter Younger, head of the cybercrime department with Bavarian Police in Germany.
WADA's Chief Investigations Officer Jack Robertson was also part of the commission team, supported by a 6-strong staff of investigators.
"The IC conducted numerous interviews and reviewed thousands of documents (and) employed cyber analysis," the report said.
Here is a look at the main allegations:
A VAST DOPING PROGRAM
The report alleges that Russian athletes routinely took banned substances to compete, with help from coaches and Sergei Portugalov, a veteran sports doctor who chaired the Russian athletics federation's medical commission.
The report says Portugalov "administered the doping programs and even injected athletes themselves."
Key sources for the accusations against him are testimony from two athletes, marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova and Yulia Stepanova, who provided investigators with e-mails in which Portugalov allegedly prescribed specific doping products.
The ARD film also included undercover footage of Russian athletes discussing the effects of taking doping products provided by coaches.
THE COVER-UP
The report alleges a large cover-up operation to conceal doping, even including the Russian Sports Ministry.
The Russian anti-doping lab's director Grigory Rodchenkov is accused of taking money from athletes to conceal positive tests.
Stepanova and her husband Vitaly Stepanov were crucial sources for the claims against Rodchenkov, as well as confidential witnesses, one of whom said the concealment plans worked "like a Swiss clock."
Rodchenkov resigned the day after the report was published. WADA has banned the lab from conducting any more tests and ordered it to send its samples abroad.
The report also says Russia operated a second, secret laboratory in Moscow, which may have screened out positive samples before they officially entered the anti-doping system.
THE SECURITY SERVICES
Rodchenkov is accused of holding weekly meetings with an agent of Russia's FSB internal security service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
Confidential sources within the laboratory said the agent used the name Evgeny Blokhin or Blotkin and was interested in "the mood of WADA." Some lab personnel believed the lab was bugged.
Anonymous sources in the lab also said FSB personnel infiltrated the lab used for the Sochi Winter Olympics last year.
LONDON OLYMPICS AFFECTED
Six Russian athletes were allowed to compete at the London Olympics even though they should have been suspended, the report says.
Two of the six won medals, with gold for race-walker Sergei Kirdyapkin.
The six posted "abnormal" values in their biological passport, a method of using blood samples to track the effect of performance-enhancing drugs, but received "unexplained and highly suspicious delayed notifications" allowing them to continue to compete at the Olympics before they were suspended, the report says, citing official documents.
EXTORTION
The report found indications that some officials had demanded money from athletes keen to avoid doping bans.
That part of the investigation was based on allegations made in last year's German documentary that marathon runner Shobukhova had paid 450,000 euros ($520,000) to Russian officials linked to Valentin Balakhnichev, then head of the Russian athletics federation and treasurer of track and field's world governing body, the IAAF.
Details of alleged extortion in the report are patchy, not helped by an "almost total lack of cooperation from athletes," the authors say, but also because the accusations are now linked to a criminal probe by French prosecutors, with former IAAF president Lamine Diack among those under investigation.
The report's authors say they expect to publish more details on alleged malpractice at the IAAF by the end of the year.
