The president of the International Biathlon Union told police that the young woman who had come to his hotel in Moscow was a prostitute, but he didn’t give a damn about the details. He didn’t remember the date or even who paid for her services, he said, but it certainly wasn’t him.
The president, Anders Besseberg, had already led the governing body of the biathlon for more than two decades and was used to receiving gifts from his Russian hosts. Like a chocolate on your pillow or a gift bag placed on a chair in your hotel room, the company of a young woman during a trip to a World Cup biathlon event was not uncommon.
And for decades, according to a report commissioned by the new biathlon leadership, Besseberg returned Russian favors by carrying out the country’s orders – defending its athletes, attacking its critics and even blocking attempts to eradicate doping from its teams.
The multi-year effort to prepare Besseberg, and later his top deputy, was so effective that, at the height of Russia’s state doping scandal, a Russian officer boasted to a colleague that the country had little to fear in biathlon – a strenuous endurance sport that combines precision shooting with cross-country ski racing – because he had Besseberg “under his control”.
Besseberg’s conduct is described in detail in the report commissioned by the governing body of the biathlon and published on Thursday. The report, the product of a two-year investigation that involved interviews with dozens of witnesses and access to evidence in an Austrian criminal investigation file, exposed Russia’s efforts to co-opt Besseberg and MP Nicole Resch, while trying to bury positive doping tests, frustrate investigations and avoid punishment.
Besseberg and Resch, a German who served as the second biathlon official, stepped down in 2018 after Austrian and Norwegian authorities announced criminal investigations into their conduct. The biathlon investigators’ report noted that neither had yet been charged with a crime and emphasized that he had not discovered that neither had committed it.
Both Besseberg and Resch denied any wrongdoing, even when they refused to meet with investigators and answer questions. There was no immediate response from his lawyers to comment on the report.
But an edited version of the report, which has been revised by The New York Times, offers an extraordinarily sinister view of the spoiled world of sports governance, where five-star hotels and six-figure awards are not uncommon. Russia’s effort to influence the biathlon leadership, the report said, took the form of favors such as briefcases full of money, hunting trips and luxury gifts.
The report also exposed what it says Russia received in return: Besseberg would defend Russia publicly and privately; biathlon leaders would cover up positive doping test results and block investigations that could involve Russian athletes; and Russian authorities, including one who has already been convicted of trying to arrange a murder, would continue to play an influential role in the sport, even after the country was caught running a vast doping program.
The scheme appeared to have worked exactly as designed. Russia has long been one of the biathlon’s world powers, winning medal places alongside suspicious rivals in all the Winter Games since 1960. In recent decades, however, Russia’s success has only grown: during the 25-year term of office Besseberg as president of the IBU, Russia won at least three medals in each Winter Olympics, and sometimes up to five, until it was excluded at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, the first to be won after the scale of the state’s doping scandal. country was revealed.
Several investigations have found that biathlon is among the sports most compromised by Russian doping, a sport so full of cheating that a former Russian national coach once said he could count the number of clean athletes “in one hand”. Several Russian champions and Olympic medalists were later implicated in doping. Some have been stripped of their medals.
“In the opinion of the commission,” wrote the authors of the report on Besseberg’s conduct, “the pattern of corrupt and unethical decision-making was apparent long before evidence of an institutionalized doping conspiracy in Russia began to emerge in 2014 and 2015 , but it was clearly exposed by Mr. Besseberg’s unfortunate response to that evidence, even when it changed inexorably from a trickle to a stream and a torrent. “At this point, the report said, Besseberg was openly taking Russia’s side against growing criticism and evidence.
The 220-page report is blunt in its details. Using whistle-blower testimonials, police evidence and a separate World Anti-Doping Agency investigation, he paints an impressive picture of Russia’s years-long effort to corrupt Besseberg.
He is accused of receiving at least $ 200,000 – and perhaps much more – from Russian officials while the country was under increasing pressure after his doping conspiracy surfaced. Aware of Besseberg’s passion for hunting, the Russians have also repeatedly invited him on hunting trips in his country. Austria-based IBU officials said Besseberg would then use official vehicles to transport his hunting trophies to his home in Norway.
His appetite, however, was not limited to money and hunting.
“It was notorious in IBU circles that Besseberg’s hosts often provided him with the services of a young ‘interpreter’ when he visited Russia,” said the report.
Although he did not cooperate with the biathlon investigation, Besseberg admitted to the police that he had received a prostitute in Moscow on a single occasion between 2010 and 2014, but denied knowing who sent the woman, saying only that it was “someone, probably from the Organizing Committee ”Said the report.
Investigators said they had evidence that the incident was not the only arrangement made, and Besseberg confirmed to the police that he had sexual encounters with other women at various biathlon events. But the report connected Besseberg’s acceptance of Russian gifts and favors with his actions and public statements on behalf of Russia, and suggested that “it justifies an inference that he did this in exchange for illicit reward and / or because he was compromised”.
“In the opinion of the commission,” concluded the report, “Mr. Besseberg’s support for Russian interests went far beyond this general concern and, in fact, far beyond all rational limits. “
The report cited Besseberg’s repeated efforts to minimize and publicly ridicule the evidence provided to investigators by one of the mentors of Russia’s doping program, Grigory Rodchenkov, and to slow down and reject the conclusion of an investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency that later led Russia’s ban on global sports.
However, even after the widespread doping conspiracy was revealed and then proven by investigators, Besseberg pressured his executive body to ignore the anti-doping organizations’ calls for sports federations to reexamine their doping measures and to stop granting events to Russia. In 2016, for example, Besseberg told biathlon leaders that they could, and should, award the 2021 world championship to Tyumen, Russia. An informant, according to the report, said Besseberg stood up before the vote and instructed delegates in no uncertain terms to “vote for Russia”.
Later, when Russia’s participation in the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea was questioned, Besseberg bypassed the executive board of the biathlon union to lobby on behalf of the Russian biathletes, according to the report, arguing that the Russian federation biathlon players and their athletes were innocent in the doping scandal and must be allowed to participate in the Games.
Jonathan Taylor, the British lawyer who led the review of the biathlon, previewed the report released Thursday at the annual congress of the biathlon union in November. In this private presentation, he highlighted eight cases involving Russian athletes that the governing body covered up and treated only years later.
World Anti-Doping Agency President Witold Banka said in a statement after the report was released that his organization had provided information to biathlon investigators and the police pursuing corruption cases, and that they remained “in close communication with law enforcement officials in Austria and Norway. ”
“The allegations presented in this report are abhorrent to anyone who cares about integrity in sport,” said Banka.
The investigators said they also found examples of Besseberg’s pro-Russian activities that occurred before the revelations about his doping program. In one case in 2009, a former Russian Olympic biathlete and IBU vice president, Alexander Tikhonov, reportedly offered Resch a jewelry box in the hope that she would not seek evidence of doping by Russian athletes. Resch told Besseberg about the offer, but he took no action, the report said.
In the years that followed, according to the report, Resch also seemed to put Russian interests ahead of the biathlon union’s public insistence that it had a zero-tolerance policy towards doping.
The report documented how Resch, while serving as secretary general of the biathlon, failed to follow the usual protocols when highly abnormal values were discovered in the blood samples of the Russian biathlete Evgeniy Ustyugov at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Ustyugov won a gold medal . (He has already been stripped of this medal and several others.)
A year later, after a used syringe containing the illegal blood-stimulating substance EPO was found at a World Cup event, Resch conspired with Besseberg to stifle an investigation that could have compared the DNA found in the syringe with a specific athlete, he said. the report . When later asked what measures the IBU had taken by members of the biathlon athletes ‘committee, Resch said the organization had sent the syringe to the police and checked the athletes’ data records for the past 10 years. “The evidence indicates that the IBU did not do any of these things,” said the report.
Resch’s pro-Russian stance, the report said, was perhaps most evident in his efforts to support three Russian biathletes in their resources after they were found guilty of doping. Although she had the right to have sympathetic opinions about the athletes, the investigators wrote, they found “clear evidence” that she had crossed the line by offering strategic advice on how to proceed with the resources. She even encouraged the three women to seek compensation from WADA, Rodchenkov and Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer whose 2016 report revealed the full scale of Russia’s cheating program.
Resch, the biathlon report said, cited health problems when he refused to speak to investigators.