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54 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2016 Sport OLYMPICS Virtù Ferries MaltaToday and Virtù Ferries have teamed up to take one lucky winner and a companion every week to Sicily, with two tickets to be won every week in our photography competition. Already been on holiday? Good: we're sending you back if your best photograph from your holidays and travels makes the cut. That's right: send us a good quality image of your holidays and we'll send the best one to the gateway of Italy with Virtù Ferries. Malta - Sicily Express Ferries For more information visit www.virtuferries.com or contact by telephone 23491000 RULES OF THE COMPETITION maltatoday Conditions apply: 1. Tickets for each week's competition can only be won by one person who submits one entry of a high-res image with description. Entrants with more than one entry WILL NOT be considered. Entrants must send a description of photo. 2. Winners will be informed before the end of the week, and then announced on maltatoday.com.mt and MaltaToday on Sunday. 3. By entering this offer, entrants consent to their photos being published and owned by Mediatoday Co Ltd. 4. The entrant with the best photograph will be awarded two (2) return tickets, valid for travel to any Virtù Ferries destination. Mediatoday's decision is final. 5. Tickets are issued free of charge, excluding port charges, and in accordance with Virtù Ferries' rules and regulations. All taxes and charges are to be paid accordingly by the winning entrant upon the issuance of tickets. 6. This offer is closed to employees and contributors of Mediatoday Co. Ltd and Virtù Ferries, or their family members. This week's theme: Travel SEND US PHOTOS FROM YOUR FAVOURITE HOLIDAY PHOTO COMPETITION Photos should be a hi-res image (one per individual entry) with a sentence or two about what inspired you to take your photo. Entrants are kindly reminded not to send in personal family pictures that might be unrelated to theme subjects unless expressly requested. If sending a photo by post, address it to: 'MaltaToday photo competition', Mediatoday, Vjal ir-Rihan, San Gwann, SGN9016 Please supply your daytime telephone number, your name, your home address, email address and Instagram name. Send the photo via email on info@mediatoday.com.mt [SUBJECT HEADING: MaltaToday photo competition] by next Friday at 9am. Themes may change from one week to the other This week's winner is NICOLE PORTELLI with the photo of Tivoli Gardens in Rome Russian doping conspiracy benefited over 1,000 competitors MORE than 1,000 Russian com- petitors across more than 30 sports were involved in an insti- tutional conspiracy to conceal positive drug tests as Moscow "hijacked international sport" over the course of five years, an independent WADA report said on Friday. The second and final part of the report for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) by Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren provided exhaustive evidence of an elaborate doping scheme spon- sored by Russia's Sports Ministry. It included switching and changing samples by opening "tamper-proof" bottles - using a method devised by the Russian secret service - and numerous other methods to bypass and cov- er up drugs tests. "We are now able to confirm a cover-up that dates back until at least 2011 that evolved from uncontrolled chaos to an institu- tionalised and disciplined medal- winning conspiracy," McLaren told a news conference. The scale was unprecedented, he said. "We have evidence revealing that more than 500 positive re- sults were reported as negative, including well-known and elite- level athletes and medal winners, who had their positive results au- tomatically falsified. More than 1,000 athletes com- peting in Summer, Winter and Paralympic sport could be identi- fied as being involved in or ben- efiting from tampering to conceal positive tests," he said. The International Olympic Committee, which had refused a blanket ban of Russian competi- tors at the Rio de Janeiro Olym- pics, said it had shown evidence of "a fundamental attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and on sport in general". It said it would to test all Russian competitors' samples from the London 2012 Olympics in addi- tion to the ongoing re-tests from the Sochi 2014 Olympics. WADA president Craig Reedie called the report "alarming", but Russia showed no sign of accept- ing its conclusions. The Sports Ministry said it would study the WADA report and cooperate with anti-doping bodies, but that it "denies that any government programmes exists to support doping in sport". Track and field chief Dmitry Shlyakhtin said he had not yet seen the report but conceded that Russian athletics' problems "did not start yesterday". However, he said it had now fulfilled all the de- mands made of it. Yelena Isinbayeva, double Olympic pole vault champion and newly-elected head of the Rus- sian Anti-Doping Agency super- visory board, said shortly before the report was released: "It is well known to us that many foreign athletes have a history of doping but compete at an international level with no problems. "If we want to clean up world sport, let's start...we don't need to concentrate on just one country." Dmitry Svishchev, a member of parliament and president of Rus- sia's Curling Federation, said: "We haven't heard anything new. Un- founded accusations against us all. If you are Russian, they accuse you of all sins." McLaren accepted that there could be widespread doping else- where, though not on the same level as in Russia, the sole focus of his investigation. McLaren pointed out that Rus- sia had won 24 gold, 26 silver and 32 bronze medals at London 2012 and no Russian athlete had tested positive. "Yet the Russian team corrupted the London Games on an unprec- edented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully estab- lished," he said. "For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians. Coaches and athletes have been playing on an uneven field." The IOC on Wednesday extend- ed provisional sanctions against Russian sport over the scandal, and an international ban on its track and field athletes remains in force pending a reform of its anti- doping programme. Forensic investigations by McLaren's team detailed how a bank of clean urine samples was kept in a Moscow laboratory, where salt and coffee were added to try to fool officials testing "B samples" in supposedly tamper- proof bottles. The report included cases where a doctored B sample did not match the DNA of previous spec- imens, and of samples that con- tained a mixture of male and fe- male urine. It added that analysis of the samples from four Russians who won gold in Sochi had shown salt readings that were physi- ologically impossible, while there was evidence that the samples of 12 Russian Sochi medallists had been tampered with. More than 1,100 items of evi- dence contained in the report have been made available to the public at the website here. Friday's report provided exten- sive evidence to support the origi- nal July report, which said Mos- cow had concealed hundreds of positive doping tests ahead of the Sochi Winter Games in 2014. The IOC declined to impose a blanket ban on Russia competing in Rio, letting international sports federations decide which athletes should be allowed to compete. Only athletics and weightlifting banned the entire Russian teams. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) did ban Russia completely from its Rio games, however, and said on Friday the full findings of the report "strike right at the heart of the integrity and ethics of sport". McLaren accepted that Russian authorities had taken many steps since his first report, removing officials who had been involved in the cover-up, setting up a new anti-doping commission and pro- posing a "gold standard" doping control regime. However, when asked about the comments of Svishchev and Isin- bayeva, he said: "The findings are not challengeable...my impression is that there is a certain embed- ded cultural aspect to what has been going on, so there probably does need to be cultural change. "That doesn't mean change won't occur, but it might take longer than a few months or a year." WADA Director General Ol- ivier Niggli told Reuters that the report only scratched the surface of the problem. "Richard McLaren and his team only had access to a fraction of what probably happened in Rus- sia," Niggli said.