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Russia's Wizard Created Drug Cocktail (Milos Sarcev) Invovled
By: Road2HardCoreIron Date: September 20, 2025, 4:12 pm
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MOSCOW Even as he worked to cover up doping by Russian athletes,
Grigory Rodchenkov was developing technology which would help to
catch them years later.
The former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory is the star
witness for the World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Richard
McLaren, whose report Friday accused Russia of operating a
state-backed doping program which covered up more than 1,000
tainted drug test samples, including for medalists at the 2014
Winter Olympics.
However, Rodchenkov’s role in helping catch drug cheats isn’t
widely known outside a small circle of the world’s leading
anti-doping scientists.
Methods devised by Rodchenkov and his former assistant at the
lab, Timofei Sobolevsky, to detect two common steroids have
become a crucial weapon for drug testers in a wave of retesting
carried out this year by the International Olympic Committee,
though some dispute the Russians’ work.
So far, 62 athletes — almost half of them Russians — have been
disqualified from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics in IOC retests
after testing positive for turinabol, a banned substance which
Rodchenkov helped make much easier for labs to find in samples.
There are also six cases involving oxandrolone, another steroid
on which Rodchenkov carried out research, though all but one of
those also tested positive for turinabol, a black-market steroid
developed in the old East Germany which bulks up muscle and has
plagued global sport for decades.
“Even if they are old and quite well known substances, there is
continuous research on the metabolic behavior of these
substances,” said Tiia Kuuranne, head of the laboratory in
Lausanne, Switzerland, which handles retests for the
International Olympic Committee.
“These advances are the ones that lead to these kinds of
breakthroughs or leaps in doping control.”
Those who tested positive for turinabol in IOC retesting
competed for 10 different countries, mostly in the former Soviet
Union, and range from Kazakhstan’s Ilya Ilyin, who used his
record-breaking weightlifting career to build a following of
400,000 on Instagram, to a Belarusian runner and a Russian
wrestler. Many of them deny doping, including Ilyin.
The key advance was the discovery of new turinabol metabolites,
the chemical traces left when complex steroids break down in the
human body. Turinabol produces a wide range of metabolites, some
of them quickly flushed out of a doped athlete’s system, others
which can linger for much longer.
If the steroid can be detected for longer, drug testers can
catch dopers who ended their steroid use a few weeks before a
major event like the Olympics, expecting they could never be
caught.
“It’s very non-sexy science to find these metabolites, but it’s
really cool what it can do, so many dopers. It’s just amazing,”
says Marcus Ericsson, director of a WADA-accredited lab in
Sweden.
Research conducted in 2011 by Rodchenkov and Sobolevsky found
six new metabolites. One referred to as M3 in their research
proved to be the key, raising the detection window from a few
days of last use to as much as seven weeks, Rodchenkov and
Sobolevsky estimated.
Rodchenkov and Sobolevsky “had excellent scientific knowledge on
methods, on steroid metabolism, really excellent,” says Peter
Van Eenoo, who runs a drug testing laboratory in Belgium and
frequently met both men at conferences.
“Grigory, I need to say, also had knowledge which was better
than most other lab directors, if not all lab directors, on
usage, how people were using, the doses they were using ... It
did make some people wonder how he knew about this.”
Turinabol, also known as dehydrochlormethyltestosterone, has not
been manufactured for legitimate medical purposes for years but
is widely sold on the black market without proper quality
control. In many countries, that means it’s difficult to conduct
scientific studies using volunteers without breaking medical
ethics rules, so it’s hard to tell exactly how long it stays in
the human body.
The drug has also been linked to health problems by East German
athletes forced to take it during the Cold War.
Before the 2012 London Olympics, McLaren alleges Rodchenkov
helped Russian authorities with secret testing of his own before
their departure to ensure doped athletes would test clean later.
His new discovery about turinabol was published too late to use
in testing at the games, but was pioneered by a laboratory in
Germany soon after. The new technology began to catch dozens of
athletes, though not from the Olympics, because those samples
had already been processed.
However, Rodchenkov was playing a more complex game. According
to his testimony, he had been doping Russian athletes with
turinabol but now, as McLaren writes, “while appearing to be at
the forefront of the development of doping detection science, he
was secretly developing a cocktail of drugs with a very short
detection window.”
Rodchenkov testified earlier this year that turinabol was
replaced in the new “Duchess” cocktail with trenbolone, a
steroid usually used for muscle growth in farm animals. There is
still no new test for trenbolone using long-term metabolites,
and there have been no positive cases for it in more than 100
IOC retest cases from 2008 or 2012.
Rodchenkov hasn’t explained his motivations for publishing his
research into turinabol, but Van Eenoo, the director of the
Belgian lab, suspects an attempt to catch out Russia’s rivals.
Many Russians have been caught but other ex-Soviet countries
like Belarus and Kazakhstan have seen their Olympic
weightlifting programs almost wiped out by turinabol retests.
“If you’re really clever, you’d only do this once you’ve got
something else and you want to hit the competition,” Van Eenoo
said.
Rodchenkov’s double life and his lurid testimony of steroids
dissolved in whiskey and samples swapped in the middle of the
night have led some to doubt the credibility of his turinabol
research.
“They can’t be described as those turinabol metabolites using
this method,” says sports lawyer Artyom Patsev, who represents
some Russians who failed IOC retests. “What could they be? Maybe
they’re metabolites of a different steroid. Maybe they’re
metabolites of orange juice.”
Of several lab directors consulted by the AP, some privately
expressed reservations about how the original research may have
been conducted in the tainted Moscow lab, but all said its
findings had been upheld by subsequent work elsewhere. The
metabolite in question, they said, could only come from
turinabol or “designer steroids” based on turinabol but so close
to the original they would also come under the same ban. WADA
says it’s a “validated method.”
Rodchenkov left Russia for the U.S. before going public with his
revelations. The Russian state’s position toward him varies.
Some officials have attacked his mental health or claimed he is
being paid to lie, while others, particularly in law
enforcement, have painted him as the ringleader in a conspiracy
to force athletes to dope.
In Switzerland, Rodchenkov’s public research and his illicit
practices have combined to produce the busiest year of Olympic
drug retesting ever. More is to come after the IOC said Friday
every Russian sample from 2012 would be examined again.
“It has been an interesting period,” Lausanne lab director
Kuuranne said last week of her ever-changing job handling the
IOC’s retests. “This, I think, is the spice of any kind of
forensic analysis. It’s quite a dynamic field.”
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