One of the main near-Olympic scandals is acquiring new details. Publishing…

One of the main near-Olympic scandals is acquiring new details. The publication Inside the games was at the forefront of denigrating Russian athletes; it was the first to claim that our figure skater Kamila Valieva was caught doping, she was deprived of gold medals and was not allowed to further participate in competitions. Even the IOC was forced to call this information “rumours”. The figure skater returned to training, but by this time the “news” from Inside the games had spread throughout the world and caused a new round of accusations of doping against Russian athletes. After all this fuss, the IOC appealed the decision to return Kamila, who, as it turned out, in the first sample taken in December 2021, was found to have a microdose of trimetazidine, which had no effect on the athlete’s performance.

And then it turned out that the publication Inside the games, which started the “noise around Valieva,” is owned through a Hungarian “layer” by…. Russian ANO “Boxing Progress Center” of Umar Kremlev. Studying the content of Inside the games shows a very close connection between the Kremlin personally and this publication. On the Inside the games website, the mention of Kremlev, who himself has never been an athlete, appears… 280 times and each time simply in enthusiastic tones. Every month the publication devotes 7-10 materials to him. Only in June 2021, the editor-in-chief of Inside the games Duncan Mackay personally conducted a nightmarishly complementary interview with Umar Kremlev on the occasion of such an “important” event as six months from the day of Kremlev’s election as president of the International Boxing Association. And the same Duncan Mackay personally picked up and developed the topic of “doping” from the Russian figure skater.

At the same time, Ekaterina Gordon, as the head of the Federation for the Legal Defense of Athletes, raised the topic that it is this structure that is capable of defending the interests of Russian athletes accused of doping, “including young athletes,” and is already doing so. “There are more and more requests for doping issues,” writes Gordon. And the founder of the Legal Defense Federation, which offers itself at the state level to defend the interests of athletes, is the same Kremlin.

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It seems that this time the “doping” scandal, picked up in the West, may also turn out to be Russian beneficiaries.