Russia banned from Olympics for doping infringements

Australia World

Updated December 10, 2019 00:52:41

Russia has been banned from the Olympics and world championships in a range of sports after a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ruling to punish it for manipulating laboratory data.

Key points:

  • Russia has been subject to scrutiny since a 2015 WADA report revealed mass doping
  • Its flag and anthem will be banned at events including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2022 soccer World Cup
  • Russian athletes untainted by doping will be allowed to compete under a neutral flag

This will bar Russia’s flag and anthem from events such as the Tokyo Olympics next year, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and the 2022 soccer World Cup in Qatar.

It will also ban the country from hosting, bidding for, or being awarded championships by world sports bodies.

WADA’s executive committee took the decision after concluding that Moscow had tampered with laboratory data by planting fake evidence and deleting files linked to positive doping tests that could have helped identify drug cheats.

The WADA committee’s decision to punish Russia with a ban was unanimous, a spokesman said.

Russia, which has tried to showcase itself as a global sports power, has been embroiled in doping scandals since a 2015 report commissioned by WADA found evidence of mass doping in Russian athletics.

Its doping woes have grown since, with many of its athletes sidelined from the past two Olympics and the country stripped of its flag altogether at last year’s Pyeongchang Winter Games as punishment for state-sponsored doping cover-ups at the 2014 Sochi Games.

WADA President Sir Craig Reedie said the “strong decision” showed the agency’s “determination to act resolutely in the face of the Russian doping crisis”.

“For too long, Russian doping has detracted from clean sport,” he said in a statement.

“The blatant breach by the Russian authorities of RUSADA’s reinstatement conditions, approved by the ExCo in September 2018, demanded a robust response — that is exactly what has been delivered [Monday].

“Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order and re-join the global anti-doping community for the good of its athletes and of the integrity of sport, but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial.”

WADA sanctions ‘unprecedented’ say experts

Monday’s sanctions had been recommended by WADA’s compliance review committee in response to the doctored laboratory data provided by Moscow earlier this year.

“Flagrant manipulation” of the Moscow lab data was “an insult to the sporting movement worldwide,” the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said last month.

Catherine Ordway, a lecturer on sporting integrity at the University of Canberra, told ABC’s The World that Russia had previously “thumbed their nose” at anti-doping agencies by providing fraudulent documents.

“You have to ask whether or not the banning of their athletes from competing under the Russian flag, uniform and anthem has been enough to stop [Russia] from cheating in this way,” she said, speaking in reference to previous sanctions.

She added that WADA’s decision was the “biggest” the sporting world has taken against a state.

One of the conditions for the reinstatement of Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA, which was suspended in 2015 in the wake of the athletics doping scandal but reinstated last year, had been that Moscow provide an authentic copy of the laboratory data.

The sanctions effectively strip the agency of its accreditation.

RUSADA head Yuri Ganus could not be immediately be reached for comment.

His deputy, Margarita Pakhnotskaya, told Russia’s TASS news agency that WADA’s decision had been expected.

If RUSADA appeals the sanctions endorsed by WADA’s executive committee, the case will be referred to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), WADA said.

Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov last month attributed the discrepancies in the laboratory data to technical issues.

The punishment, however, leaves the door open for clean Russian athletes to compete at major international sporting events without their flag or anthem for four years, as was the case during the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.

Some Russian officials, meanwhile, have branded the call for sanctions unfair and likened it to broader Western attempts to hold back the country.

“I believe [the WADA decision] requires for a tough reaction for our nation, first of all from our President, since he is the one who has the authority to bring order in this sphere in Russia,” Russian MP Igor Lebedev told state domestic news agency RIA News.

ABC/Reuters

Topics: doping-in-sports, sport, olympics-summer, winter-olympics, russian-federation

First posted December 09, 2019 21:32:48