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Russia Faces Four-Year Ban From Sporting Competitions

By RFE/RL November 26, 2019

A key panel of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommends Russia be hit with a four-year ban from sporting competitions over noncompliance with the World Anti-Doping Code.

The global anti-doping watchdog on November 25 said the recommendation by its Compliance Review Committee is based on a forensic review of "inconsistencies" found in some of the data that were obtained by the agency from a Moscow laboratory in January.

WADA's Executive Committee will consider the recommendation and proposed consequences on December 9, a statement said.

The four-year ban would prevent Russia from taking part in next year's summer Olympics in Tokyo and the Beijing Winter Games in 2022.

However, the ban isn't across-the-board as WADA recommended neutral status for Russian athletes without their national flags or anthems played if they medal.

The country was officially banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, but a number of Russian athletes were allowed to compete as neutrals under the Olympic flag.

WADA has documented more than 1,000 Russian doping cases across dozens of sports, most notably at the Winter Olympics that Russia hosted in Sochi in 2014.

The country was found guilty of a government-organized effort to mask samples from athletes using banned substances between 2011 and 2015.

Full disclosure of data from the Moscow lab was a key condition of Russia's controversial reinstatement by WADA in September 2018.

But its Compliance Review Committee said the data handed over was rife with problems, describing it as "neither complete nor fully authentic."

It said data on "hundreds" of positive tests have been removed while "underlying raw data and PDF files have been deleted or altered."

This means that more than 140 cases could have disappeared involving athletes who may or may not still be competing because of the tampered data.

Moreover, Russia handed over the data -- which was supposed to be used to corroborate many of the doping cases dating to the 2014 Olympics and before -- two weeks past deadline.

The deadline was December 31, 2018.

According to WADA's news release, "someone in the Moscow laboratory" was planting contrived evidence in an attempt to frame the lab's former director, Grigory Rodchenko, the whistle-blower on the Russian government's covert doping program, AP reported.

Besides a ban from major sporting competition, the committee recommended Russia be barred from hosting major events and from bidding for any such event. It also called for Russian officials be barred from attending major events.

This may include losing the right to host group games and a quarter-final tie in next year's European soccer championship organized by UEFA, the continent's soccer governing body.

Russia can appeal any sanctions to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

RUSAF's suspension is still in place, and World Athletics, the sport's global governing body, on November 22 halted the federation's readmission process and said it could be expelled altogether.

The announcement came after RUSAF President Dmitry Shlyakhtin and several other officials were provisionally suspended over breaches of anti-doping rules. Shlyakhtin later resigned from the post.

On November 25, the head of Russia's Olympic Committee called for the entire leadership of RUSAF to be replaced, saying the scandal around the federation "discredits all of Russian sport, inflicts colossal reputational damage on our country as a whole, and undermines the foundations of the Olympic movement's integrity."

"If this recommendation will not be taken into account, we will consider the question of the membership of the athletics federation in the Russian Olympic Committee at our next executive committee meeting," Stanislav Pozdnyakov said in a statement.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP and TASS

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia- faces-four-year-ban-from-sporting- competition/30291710.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.