Moscow, May 18 (IANS) The world of sports needs a unified system of fighting against abuse of performance enhancing drugs in light of recently frequent doping scandals, Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko said on Wednesday.
President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach said earlier in the day that a number of athletes could be banned from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil after their doping samples, collected at the 2008 Olympics in China, had been retested, reports Tass.
"Today's statement from the IOC shows that this is not the problem with Russia only," Mutko said. "We must move ahead and create a unified system, which would exclude all possibilities of manipulations or of making cocktails."
"It means we need a system, which would be trusted in the whole world and we are ready for it," Mutko said. "Foreign specialists are already working in RUSADA (the Russian Anti-Doping Agency) and we are ready for a foreign expert to take charge of the agency for several years."
In an interview with New York Times, published last week, ex-head of Moscow anti-doping laboratory Grigory Rodchenkov claimed that the Russian sports authorities allegedly prepared a special doping program for national athletes in order to win most of the medals at home Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.
The ex-doping official said some Russian Olympic gold medallists in Sochi took the banned substances.
Following the publication of the US daily, the IOC requested the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to initiate an investigation into allegations that testing at the Sochi Laboratory was subverted.
The IOC also urged the Russian Olympic authorities to provide full assistance in the World Anti Doping Agency's new probe.
New York Times also reported on Monday citing its sources that the US Department of Justice launched an investigation into allegations of doping abuse in Russian sports.
