A SCATHING report outlining a state-sanctioned doping system in Russia prompted immediate calls for the nation’s entire team to be sidelined from the Summer Games, raising the possibility that the Olympics could go on without a sports superpower for the first time since the 1980s.

    The investigation released Monday confirmed a scheme run out of the anti-doping lab in Moscow that ensnared 28 summer and winter sports, from track to snowboarding to table tennis. It lasted at least four years and involved at least 312 positive tests that went unreported at the behest of higher-ups in the country’s sports ministry.

    “A mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government,’’ said Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

    The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) swiftly called for the International Olympic Committee to consider a full ban of the Russian team from the Summer Olympics, which start Aug. 5 in Rio de Janiero. IOC president Thomas Bach said the committee wouldn’t hesitate to apply the toughest sanctions available.

    The IOC executive board was expected to meet yesterday to begin sorting through options.

    It’s no sure thing the Russians will receive a blanket ban. It’s a decision filled with political ramifications that involve a key Olympic country. It puts the IOC in the position of ruling against one of its biggest supporters, a nation that spent more than US$50 billion hosting the Winter Games in Sochi just two years ago.

    Monday’s report, commissioned by WADA and written by arbitrator Richard McLaren, said allegations made by Moscow’s former anti-doping lab director about sample switching at the Sochi Olympics went much as described in a New York Times story in May. That program involved dark-of-night bottle tampering in order to switch dirty samples with clean ones; it prevented Russian athletes, including more than a dozen medal winners, from testing positive.

    But McLaren said the bottle tampering in Sochi was a one-shot deal. Meanwhile, he described tactics he labeled “disappearing positive methodology’’ that began in 2011, shortly after Russia’s disappointing performance at the Vancouver Olympics.

    Russia has criticized as politically motivated the attempt by U.S. and Canada’s anti-doping agencies to obtain its complete exclusion from the Olympics over doping.

    Dmitry Svishchev, chairman of the Russian parliamentary committee on sports, compared the calls to economic sanctions in the Ukraine crisis “imposed on us because of unconfirmed facts.”

    He added: “Doping is just an excuse to outdo competitors. The instigators are probably the U.S.A.”

    Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko has described accusations of systematic doping in Russia as “groundless.”  (SD-Agencies)