Dmitry Sokolov, Kirill Sveshnikov and Dmitry Strakhov, the Russian team pursuit riders who were barred from participating in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, have threatened legal action against the World Anti-Doping Agency and the former Moscow lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, according to Insidethegames.biz.
Russia was forced to withdraw from the team pursuit after Sokolov, Sveshnikov and Strakhov were implicated in the WADA-mandated McLaren Report, which examined allegations that the state had covered up positive doping cases across a range of sports in recent years. The three riders made an unsuccessful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport on the eve of the Games.
Insidethegames.biz reports that a letter sent by Sokolov, Sveshnikov and Strakhov to WADA, the UCI and the IOC reveals that they had been accused of taking EPO in the McLaren report, a charge the three riders have denied.
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In the letter, the three riders question the evidence provided by Rodchenkov, who resigned as director of the Moscow lab in January and left for the United States due to concern for his safety. In an interview with the New York Times in May, Rodchenkov providing damning detail of the Moscow lab’s manipulation of anti-doping samples at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. A spokesman for Vladimir Putin dismissed his allegations as “a turncoat’s libel.”
“We cannot understand why we were barred from the Olympics due to this insance [sic] criminal's testimony, in violation of the World Anti-Doping Code provisions," Sokolov, Sveshnikov and Strakhov wrote of Rodchenkov in their letter.
"We evidently were deprived of any fair possibility just to present our explanations in relation to these unfounded and false allegations made by such a persistent offender like Mr Rodchenkov."
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