Grigory Rodchenkov has not seen his wife and two children in person since 2015 and probably never will again. His current whereabouts are not known to anyone except him and his bodyguards, but he is regularly moved from one safe house to another.
Whether through prosthetics or surgery, Rodchenkov also looks radically different from the last known depictions of him.
His life began to change dramatically 10 years ago when The Mail on Sunday first published his investigation into Russia’s systematic drug cheating in sport, which he had masterminded.
He is now 64 and is part of the US witness protection program, having become a whistleblower in 2016. Rodchenkov, the former boss of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, told the MoS the story was “like a bomb to me.”
Ten years later, he is still not convinced that Russian sport has turned its back on drug use in institutions. He urges the International Olympic Committee to “impose a meaningful and long-term ban on Russian athletes until Russia fundamentally reforms its system of sports preparation.”
Grigory Rodchenkov is in a witness protection program after becoming a whistleblower
Vladimir Putin is accused of supporting the Russian plot to help their doping athletes
Russia has been ‘banned’ from recent Olympics, though those bans were largely pointless as hundreds of Russians have been allowed to compete individually.
Even World Athletics has lifted the suspension for Russians after seven years of suspension “for flagrant institutional doping violations”. Russian athletes and coaches will continue to be banned from athletic events for the foreseeable future due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Rodchenkov was speaking on the 10th anniversary of our scoop, when we named him as a key figure in Russian doping and cover-up plots.
“After your story was published, it hit me like a bomb,” he says. “It prompted many other reporters to ask difficult questions. In that time, [sports minister] Vitaly Mutko was on my side. I believed that the cover-up would protect me, but I was certainly worried about the future and questioned the whole system.”
Our story quoted a senior Russian winter sports official speaking of continued doping in their country, predicting that Russia would top the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics medal tally by cheating — and get away with it.
“I was shocked that someone told you [about the Sochi plan] not at all, because it was a well-kept secret,” says Rodchenkov. “Good job reporting!” He said he was “never quite sure” that his plan to trade Russian rivals’ drug-contaminated urine for clean ones during the Games would work. “There were World Anti-Doping Agency inspectors everywhere. There were so many ways the system could have been revealed or discovered.
“But yes, it worked perfectly, largely thanks to all the involvement of the FSB agents,” Rodchenko said, referring to the Russian secret service. “But it also worked out because the IOC really didn’t care.
“The IOC has never bothered about doping control and nothing has changed.”
He plans to release a book based on his diaries revealing the full story of Russian doping
He was shocked to discover that the Russians were open about the doping plan during Sochi 2014
At the end of 2015, life changed dramatically for Rodchenkov. The German TV channel ARD had broadcast broadly the same story as reported by the MoS in December 2014, with classified footage of competitors talking about doping.
It was a bomb. It led to a WADA investigation that in November 2015 confirmed the conspiracy and Rodchenkov’s central role. Rodchenkov fled to the US with the help of American filmmaker Bryan Fogel and entered witness protection.
After publishing an autobiography in 2020, Rodchenkov has written a second book, ‘Doping. Forbidden pages’. He says: ‘This will tell a fuller story of the history of the Russian doping system from my diaries, which I was able to retrieve from Russia.
“I hope my book will eventually lead the IOC to impose a meaningful and long-term ban on Russian athletes until Russia fundamentally reforms its sports preparation system, which would take at least a decade.”
In Fogel’s Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, Rodchenkov said state doping in Russia was sanctioned from above by Vladimir Putin. He now says he is “optimistic about future changes” in Russia.
“As difficult as it has been to watch Russia’s terror campaign against Ukraine, I believe that Ukraine will prevail and force Putin out of power and put him in prison where he belongs.”
Rodchenkov is now indirectly helping to catch drug smugglers through the Rodchenkov Act, a piece of US law that took effect in 2020. The law is designed so that drug smugglers and their facilitators can be prosecuted in America wherever their plots are found in the world. .
Rodchenkov is now helping catch drug cheats through an eponymous US law introduced in 2020
The first conviction under the new law came this year, when a dealer named Eric Lira pleaded guilty to helping Olympians, including Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare, obtain performance-enhancing drugs for the 2021 Tokyo Games. Damian Williams, an American District Attorney in Manhattan called it “a turning point for international sport.”
Rodchenkov says: “It was a great honor that Congress named the anti-doping law after me. I’m still impressed. But the law needs to be used more widely.
“The underlying doping control system remains weak. Many innocent and clean athletes continue to fall victim to dirty athletes, including those in state-sponsored doping regimes.
“It will stay that way until all doping activists are really afraid that the US will put them in prison. On that day we finally get a real chance to protect clean athletes.’