MOSCOW: Vitaly Mutko has accused Richard McLaren’s report to the World Anti-Doping Agency of containing “many factual errors and inaccuracies.”
Russian news agency TASS reported the Deputy Prime Minister and former Sports Minister as reacting critically after six members of the Russian ski racing were temporarily suspended amid some confusion concerning anti-doping breaches at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.
McLaren published an verdict interim report last July into an institutional doping and cover-up system in Russia and followed through more details in his substantive report before Christmas.
Mutko said: “While it is not possible to generalise, every athlete’s individual case is different and we are seeeing that the [McLaren] report contains a lot of mistakes, a lot of inaccuracies.
“It is based only on the testimony of the accusers with the aim of casting a shadow over all of Russian sport.”
Mutko conceded that it was difficult to defend the credibility and efficiency of hte Moscow anti-doping laboratory and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency but he added: “We now need everyone to be objective, and not, as happened with athletics when we fulfilled all the requirements, yet they still did not let our clean athletes compete.”
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