That led WADA to call for all Russian teams to be banned from the Summer Olympics next month in Rio.
Advertisement
Russian gymnasts must be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games and not tarred with the same brush as the country’s banned track and field athletes, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) said on Monday. Hammer thrower Sergey Litvinov told our Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, what the ban means for him. But the call by WADA is likely to followed up by the USA and Canadian anti-doping agencies.
“At a fundamental level the Russian Olympic Committee has failed in its duty as an NOC to: “promote the fundamental principles and values of Olympism, ‘ to ‘ensure the observance of the Olympic Charter, ‘ as well as to ‘adopt and implement the WADA code” in Russia”.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board was set to hold a telephone conference Tuesday to decide what steps to take after the publication Monday of the WADA investigation carried out by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren.
“Looking forward, we must come together as an worldwide community – comprised of those who truly believe in the spirit of Olympism – to ensure this unprecedented level of criminality never again threatens the sports we cherish”.
They include banning Russian government officials from global sports events, maintaining the suspensions of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory and Russian anti-doping agency, and asking the worldwide federations of the sports mentioned in McLaren’s report to consider following the IAAF lead by banning their Russian member associations.
“The IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated”, Bach added. Last week, he said if the report was as damning as expected, he would push for such a ban.
WADA president Craig Reedie said Russian Federation must sack government officials implicated in the wide-ranging doping scheme.
Rodchenkov said the doping program was “working like a Swiss watch” at Sochi and helped at least 15 Russian medalists avoid doping detection.
There are no forthcoming recommendations for punishment from the investigator whose report found widespread, state-sponsored doping in Russian sports.
WADA’s report into the scandal calls on Russia’s track and field team to be banned from global competition, including from the 2016 Rio Olympics, until “state-sponsored” doping is eradicated.
U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun said the report proved a point he had made earlier this summer – that the current anti-doping system is broken.
What parameters the International Olympic Committee will use to determine Russia’s fate is unknown.
“A mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government”, is what Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called it.
Even before the report was published, several anti-doping agencies had lined up to demand that Russian Federation be banned from Rio, pointing out that the International Olympic Committee and IPC have the power to do so.
“In an ideal world, we would’ve done a great deal more work with the data”, McLaren said. Meanwhile, he described tactics he labeled “disappearing positive methodology” that began in 2011, shortly after Russia’s disappointing performance at the Vancouver Olympics.
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. It included the 2013 track world championships in Moscow and was in place as recently as the 2015 swimming world championships in Kazan – when everyone in Russian sports knew they were under the doping microscope.
Advertisement
Russia’s deputy minister of sports would direct lab workers which positive samples to send through and which to hold back.
