• Mystery in Sochi Doping Case Lies With Tamper-Proof Bottle - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/sports/russia-doping-bottles-olympics-2014.html

    The bottles, used for testing at the Olympics since the Sydney Games in 2000, are made by #Berlinger, a Swiss company founded in 1865 as a mechanical cotton weaving mill. Until this week, they were largely ignored vessels in the global fight against doping.

    Now they are prominent characters in an extraordinary ploy that affected the results of the Winter Olympics, according to Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran Russia’s antidoping laboratory for a decade. His accounts of the doping operation were first reported by The New York Times this week.

    Berlinger’s bottles were first presented to the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission in the late 1990s, in a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, said Andrea Berlinger, the sixth generation of her family to run the company.

    Dr. Catlin, then a member of that commission, recalled that the Berlingers showcased various bottle designs to a roomful of doctors. “All of us were particularly pleased and excited by this bottle,” he said, “because it looked pretty bulletproof.

    Russian officials somehow figured out a way to remove the cap without breaking it, he said, enabling him to replace the steroid-tainted urine of top athletes with clean urine, stockpiled in soda bottles and other containers in the months leading up to the Games.

    We’re all a bit speechless, to be honest,” Ms. Berlinger said Friday. “We’re seeing a lot of support. No one can believe it.
    […]
    The only way to open the bottle, according to Berlinger, is to use a special machine sold by the company for about $2,000; it cracks the bottle’s cap in half, making it apparent that the sample has been touched.

    Dr. Rodchenkov said that for at least 15 Russian athletes who won medals at Sochi, both the A and B samples were substituted before they were tested. None of the bottles’ caps — which are branded with unique seven-digit codes — showed any signs of having been opened.

    Each night at Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov said, sealed bottles were passed through a hole in the wall of the storage closet that served as his shadow laboratory. The bottles were handed to a man who he believed worked for the Russian intelligence service, the F.S.B. Within two hours, he said, those same bottles were returned to him, their caps unlocked.

    Magicians were on duty,” Dr. Rodchenkov said, suspecting that F.S.B. officers had studied the toothed metal rings that lock the bottle when the cap is twisted shut. According to him, they collected hundreds of them leading up to the Olympics.

    Dr. Catlin theorized that heat had been applied to remove the bottles’ caps.

    He said he had expressed some concern about the bottles years ago, asking if they could be outfitted with internal thermometers, to show if the sample had been frozen or heated. “But that’s just a wild guess,” he said.

    #tamper-proof or not ?