WADA shares blame for Russian doping: Mutko

Moscow, September 12 

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko on Tuesday pinned some of the blame for the country’s mass doping violations on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and insisted it was time to turn the page.

Mutko said the appointment of Grigory Rodchenkov, who was behind the systematic violation of anti-doping rules in Russia, as the head of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, had been approved by WADA.

“We’ve acknowledged that this man (Rodchenkov) himself violated all the WADA rules, regulations and standards,” Mutko said. “And we’ve fired him.

“We are rearranging the (anti-doping) system but it should be rearranged so that WADA could also share responsibility. They should have been responsible for (Rodchenkov) before as they have issued him a licence and given him a work permit.

“They were in control of him but now the state (Russia) is blamed for it,” he added. Mutko insisted that Russian authorities had never run a state-sponsored doping programme. — Reuters