“For the 2016 Olympics our recommendation is that the Russian Federation is suspended”.
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The commission said even the country’s intelligence service, the FSB, was involved, spying on Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory by posing as engineers during the Sochi Olympics, with the inference being they were there to intimidate staff.
It also wants five athletes and five coaches to get lifetime doping bans.
Pound said that “overwhelming portions” of the program had been proven accurate.
Seppelt’s initial reports alleged that Russian track and field authorities extorted $450,000 from Shobukhova to suppress information from an anti-doping lab so that she could compete in the 2012 London Games.
It said there were widespread examples of “cover-ups, destruction of samples, payment of money to hide doping tests” and called for the lab’s accreditation to be removed with immediate effect.
Coe said: “It is a shocking report”.
The report also identified “systemic failures” in the IAAF that prevent an “effective” anti-doping programme.
Asked if the findings were “the tip of the iceberg”, Pound said: “I’m afraid you’re probably right”.
The Russian athletics scandal is the biggest challenge sports anti-doping agencies have faced, according to Craig Reedie, but the World Anti-Doping Agency president believes revelations of state-sponsored doping will ultimately make sport cleaner.
Mutko retorted by slamming the report, saying Russian Federation was being persecuted, and threatening to cut government funding for anti-doping work. WADA concluded that Russian Federation is not the only country, and track and field is not the only sport, with “orchestrated” doping.
The affair took a dramatic twist last week when former IAAF chief Lamine Diack was charged with corruption on suspicion of taking bribes to cover up doping cases.
The global Olympic Committee has provisionally suspended Diack’s honorary membership and said in a statement that, if appropriate, it would react to the WADA report “with its usual zero tolerance policy”.
A report published on Tuesday (AEDT) said the commission – set up to investigate allegations of systematic cheating and cover-ups within Russian athletics – had found existence of “widespread cheating through the use of doping substances and methods”.
“This was an absolutely politically motivated statement like anti-Russian sanctions”, Vladimir Uyba, the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA), told the Interfax news agency.
The commission still has two issues to report on: the review on levels of criminal activity, which has been passed on to the French police and Interpol; and, more imminently, on accusations surrounding blood profiles and claims that the IAAF did not follow up suspicious results.
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“But clearly there will have been a lot of damage done by these allegations and the fallout as we move forward and clean the sport up”.
