State-Sponsored Olympic Doping Programme

The independent McLaren Report, commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and published in 2016, found that Russia had operated a state-directed doping programme across the majority of summer and winter Olympic sports from at least 2011 to 2015, including a scheme to swap tainted urine samples for clean ones through a hole drilled in a wall at the Sochi anti-doping lab during the 2014 Winter Olympics, with the FSB security service directly involved. The findings led the IOC and international federations to ban the Russian team from competing under its own flag at multiple subsequent Olympic Games.