View from Moscow: 'WADA offer a guillotine to cure a headache'

To put it simply, everyone is shocked here.

Evgeny Slyusarenko of Championat, Russia's most respected Olympic sports journalist, is not happy, writing that WADA has offered a guillotine to cure headache.

"Even reputed criminals have a chance to hear the prosecution and to build a defence," he wrote.

"It's the goal of any investigation, if you want to find the truth. But I get the feeling that in the case of Russian Athletics the only goal of all this noise is an attempt to destroy everything by people sure that they know the whole truth.

"There is doping in Russian sports. There is a lot of doping in Russian sports. And we need to cure it with the help of journalists and international anti-doping agencies.

"But WADA has worked on this case for 10 months and offered only guillotine to cure our headache."

[WADA REPORT: WADA tells IAAF to suspend Russia over 'state-sponsored doping']

[MORE REACTION: How the athletics world reacted to the WADA revelations]

Grigory Rodchenkov, director of the Moscow anti-doping centre, went even further with his flat-out denial of several of the key claims made in Monday's report.

"Richard Pound says that I ordered the destruction of 1417 samples," he said. "But we have kept every sample WADA asked us to keep, our fridges are full.

"We only disposed of samples whose expiry dates had passed before we received WADA's instructions. It was a planned disposal of samples whose expiry date was before September 10th of 2015. We did it in full compliance with WADA' International Standards for Laboratories.

"I have explained to WADA specialists many times how everything is organised but an independent commission has made its own interpretation, from which you would think that I took all the samples and threw them out. There are a lot of cases of strange treatments of reality in this WADA report."

Vitaly Mutko,, the Russian Minister of Sports, echoed that same assertion: "If we must shut down our anti-doping operation, we will do it with pleasure. We will stop to paying fees, stop funding the Russian Anti-Doping Agency and Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory. We'd save a lot of money.

"But to do so would be bad. The destruction of samples was carried out with the knowledge of WADA, who sent us a circular. There is a procedure in place, and they told us to keep samples starting from a particular date. There were no instructions on what to do with other probes, so we destroyed them."

['SABOTAGED': London 2012 'sabotaged', says scathing WADA report into Russian doping]

In Sport Express, Oleg Shamonaev did not worry about such grumbling - instead, making a call for swift action to save Russia's participation at the greatest sporting event in the world.

"The main thing is not to learn what investigators could tell and what they couldn't," he wrote.

"The main thing is to understand what consequences will this bucket of mud will have. And the question of the day is whether there is a is real threat of Russian athletes being disqualified from the 2016 Olympics. Right now this seems to be a real possibility.

"It seems we have only two chances: to dismantle the entire system of the sport's management and to try build something new very fast, or to watch Rio Olympics on TV."