Russia replaced its entire team for the under 18 world ice hockey championship to "minimise" the risk of failing tests for the banned drug meldonium, Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said on Friday. The Russian team that leaves for the world championships in the United States on Saturday will be all under 17 players. Russia has been rocked by sports doping scandals in recent months and Mutko said: "The point of changing the team is that if a group of athletes took meldonium, we don't know whether it will be detected."
"We are minimising the risks," Russian news agencies quoted him as saying. Sports officials removed the team's coach and players on Thursday and replaced them with the younger squad to fly to Grand Forks in North Dakota. Russian hockey federation president, legendary Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretyak, refused to address doping suspicions on Thursday. He said the decision to send a younger team to the under 18 tournament was "tactical". Tretyak added that the Russian federation had not conducted informal doping tests on the squad's players. Two players on Russia's original under 18 team, whose names do not appear on the updated world championship roster, refused to comment when contacted by AFP. The federation's honorary president, Alexander Steblin, was the first Russian official to say the move was related to meldonium, blaming the team's head coach for a situation he called a "catastrophe".
Since tennis star Maria Sharapova admitted last month she tested positive for meldonium at the Australian Open, a number of high-profile athletes - including Olympic swimmer Yulia Efimova - have also tested positive for the endurance-boosting drug. Mutko said on Friday that 40 Russian athletes had tested positive for meldonium since a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ban came into force on January 1.
The minister said up to 90 percent of those Russian athletes who tested positive for meldonium had underestimated how long it takes for the drug to leave the body. The drug's manufacturer, the Latvian-based pharmaceutical company Grindeks, has said that meldonium can remain in the body for several months after having been consumed. "If it wasn't for meldonium, we would be clean," Russian agencies quoted Mutko as saying.
Russia is also struggling to overturn a ban against its athletics federation so that it can take part in the Rio Olympics in August. It was suspended in November over a WADA report alleging state-sponsored doping and mass corruption in track and field. Four doping failures for meldonium among Russian athletes last month came as a potential blow to efforts to be reinstated by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).