Australian three-time Olympic silver medallist Raelene Boyle has added her voice to calls for Russia to be banned from next month’s Olympics after a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) investigation found the country’s FSB spy agency had helped athletes evade dope tests.

The WADA report found the Russian government operated “a state-dictated failsafe system” of doping, including at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

Speaking to the ABC, Boyle said the report’s findings came as no surprise.

“I think you’ve got to be pretty naive if you believe that only the track and field athletes are taking some performance enhancing drugs,” Boyle said.

She called for Russia to be “eliminated” from the Olympics.

“Probably in the Russian state, I think there would be no doubt what’s happening and I think it would be a good start to ban the Russians entirely, because I would have little doubt that there would be many people, if any, in their entire team that would not be taking something,” she said.

“Russia in the world of drugs in sport is only the tip of the iceberg.

Vladimir Putin has warned of a split. Photo: Getty

“It’s just they come under a different regime and it’s organised from one spot.

“I think in the rest of the world a lot of it you’ll find it organised by coaches and athletes themselves.”

The report, conducted by Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren, was commissioned in response to allegations made by former Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory head Grigory Rodchenko.

Its findings have the potential to throw the Olympic movement into crisis, with world, American and Canadian anti-doping bodies calling for Russia —which has already had its track and field and weightlifting athletes banned from competing in Rio— to be thrown out of the 2016 Olympics.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned of a possible split in the Olympics, comparing the situation to the boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Games of the early 1980s.

Russia in the world of drugs in sport is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Raelene Boyle

Specialist in the management of drugs in sport Jason Mazanov said WADA should share some of the blame.

“Given that there was an awful lot of the corruption going on in the system in Russia, they should have picked it up much earlier and it should’ve been WADA who did this and not investigative journalists,” Mr Mazanov said.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will hold a telephone hook-up overnight to decide what sanctions to impose on Russia.

IOC president Thomas Bach said that “in the immediate short term, the IOC Executive Board will convene in a telephone conference to take its first decisions, which may include provisional measures and sanctions with regard to the Olympic Games [in] Rio 2016.”

-ABC