The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin’s Secret Doping Empire: How I Brought Down Russia’s Secret Doping Empire – Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2020

Very interesting read & his style is very blunt. This man is however a total parasite-he happily admits/boasts to being a drug dealer, going to extraordinary lengths to tamper with samples, paints what he & others did as heroic & states that doping is brilliant because it allows mediocre runners such as himself in his younger days to be able to compete with gifted runners-according to him having decent genetics & putting in a lot of hard work is an unfair advantage & lesser talents doping just evens up the odds! He shows himself to be a total parasitic leech who uses others to his own ends-the man who gave him a job is later turned on by him/ratted out to fulfill his own ambitions of taking that guys job & then changes the locks/pass-codes immediately & tells him he is not even allowed in to collect anything, athletes are sacrificed-a random Sambo wrestler is given a positive result in place of a state protected athlete from a bigger sport etc.Unlike the other book with the tester & the athlete-one who hated what was happening & spent years trying to get the world to take notice & the athlete used & abused by this weasel & others like him who finally woke up to how repulsive the whole set-up is, he actually still thinks everything he did was brilliant. This guy only fled because he was now expendable/an embarrassment to those in power in Russia-of course he left his wife & kids behind because they are expendable to him as well, now he hides out in the US, protected by their witness protection programme, while his family have had their assets frozen, house seized etc back home. The worst parts of the book are his acting like a poor innocent being picked on by WADA & the Russian heavy mob, where he proudly boasts of pulling every trick in the book to avoid the latter's investigation into him-stabbing himself, getting sent to mental health facilities, using his contacts/status etc. He is reaping what he sowed, experiencing what he did to others & has to spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder & waiting for the bullet with his name on it & it is impossible to feel even the slightest sympathy for him.

The extraordinary detailed evidence presented in this book confirms the extent of the cheating perpetrated by Russian athletes, condoned and facilitated by the state. Rodchenkov's writing is compelling. It is hard to imagine how Russia's reputation on the international sporting stage can ever be restored after such a calculated, orchestrated abuse of the system over many years. It would be naive to believe that there are not other guilty parties in this massive deception of the sporting community and hopefully the truth will emerge about other conspiracies in the future to ensure that sporting integrity is re-established.

This account of the reasoning behind the industrial scale doping in Sport by the Russian authorities, and the lengths they went to achieve this, by the author who was at the forefront of this scandal, needs to be read to be believed! Technical and hard to follow in places for this reader, and perhaps I’m not as interested in the subject as I thought

It is really interesting to hear his direct account especially after watching Icarus. Very interesting stories like his personal experience of Ben Johnson's test data and following disqualification. I love the audio version as it allows me to "read" when I run or cycle.

If you haven’t seen the documentary on this shocking and fascinating tale you’ll find this a compelling account. However, it didn’t really add anything for me - in fact I think the documentary is better. The author whitewashes his own involvement in the doping scandal and he probably didn’t have any choice but to take the actions he did. Still an interesting story and a shocking endictment of Russian sport and I suspect Russian society in general.