Nikita Kamaev
The former executive director of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency has died, two months after leaving his post amid Russia’s doping scandal.
In a telephone interview with The Associated Press yesterday, RUSADA spokeswoman Nataliya Koshel confirmed Nikita Kamaev died on Sunday. He was 52.
Former RUSADA general director Ramil Khabriev told the Tass news agency he believed Kamaev had a “massive heart attack” at home after feeling pain in his chest.
“I’ve been told that he was out cross-country skiing, came home, and felt pain in the area of the heart,” Khabriev said. “I’d never heard him complain of anything to do with his heart. Perhaps his wife knew about some sort of problem.”
Kamaev and Khabriev quit in December as the Russian Sports Ministry pushed for the agency to carry out reforms under new leadership. That was a month after RUSADA was stopped from conducting drug tests when the World Anti-Doping Agency declared it non-compliant with anti-doping rules.
A WADA commission accused RUSADA of covering up cases of doping by leading Russian athletes, giving them advance knowledge of supposedly surprise tests and allowing banned athletes to continue competing.
Kamaev was the day-to-day head of RUSADA operations from 2011 until his resignation in December. The day after the WADA commission’s report emerged accusing RUSADA of covering up doping, he made a vehement defense of the organization, saying it had been fighting drug use effectively, and claiming that the commission produced a biased report based on unreliable testimony from athletes who had been caught doping.
“Some of the issues have a particular acuteness and are, if you like, politicized,” he said at the time. Accusations that agents from Russia’s FSB security service infiltrated the doping lab for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were the product of an “inflamed imagination,” he added.
Kamaev’s death came less than two weeks after another former RUSADA figure, founding chairman Vyacheslav Sinev, who left the agency in 2010, died on Feb. 3, according to RUSADA, which didn’t elaborate. AP
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