He asks the Russian athletics federation president “to contact each athlete and inform them individually on their abnormal blood profile, sending them a strong and clear message which could ultimately be a deterrent”.
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Russian Federation is now banned from worldwide track and field after a report commissioned by WADA alleged widespread doping and cover-ups in the country.
Last week Balakhnichev was banned for for breaching IAAF doping regulations.
The IAAF was concerned that Russian athletes could die from abuse of blood-boosting drugs and transfusions. “These results are startling because not only are these athletes cheating their fellow competitors, but these results are putting their health and even their own lives in very serious danger”.
The first part of the report authored by former WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) chief Dick Pound was released in November following an investigation that lasted almost a year, and found a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” in Russian athletics.
– minimum bans for serious doping offences should be extended to eight years to ensure cheats miss two Olympic and Paralympic cycles.
Sessions also focused on organizational issues that are necessary to quickly consider doping cases, investigating problems mentioned in the report by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Independent Commission, collecting information about the location of athletes and comprehensive testing of Russian athletes before WADA restores the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), as well as educational and other measures necessary for introducing zero tolerance policy for doping in Russian athletics.
Last week three of athletics’ leading figures – Papa Massata Diack, the son of the former IAAF president Lamine Diack and a marketing consultant for the organisation, former Russian athletics federation (ARAF) president and IAAF treasurer Valentin Balakhnichev, and Alexei Melnikov, a senior ARAF coach – were handed lifetime bans by the IAAF’s ethics commission for blackmailing athletes and covering up positive drugs tests. Seventy-six elite Russian athletes had been sanctioned since 2011 – more than any other country.
“It is true that we have had a recurring problem with doping in Russia”, Weiss said.
The IAAF said these proposals were never put into action, and Balakhnichev told AP they never reached him.
A WADA spokesman on Wednesday said the suggestions in the AP story, if accurate, were “most concerning”.
-April 10, 2012: Another internal note on Russian blood passport cases, marked “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL”, proposes that the sanctioned second-tier athletes should not be stripped of their competition results.
“I felt sad and angry and now it feels as if we are waiting to be slaughtered (by Thursday’s report), but it’s better that it has all come out”, said Barlag who, after sharing the same track as Sebastian Coe at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, now stands shoulder to shoulder with the IAAF president in seeking radical reform to save it fom the biggest crisis in the sport’s history.
Two internal IAAF papers before the London Olympics proposed not publishing doping sanctions for lesser-known Russians.
“In 2011, there was a huge influx of suspicious profiles coming through the ABP”, the IAAF told Reuters in a statement on Tuesday, adding that as each case can take up to 18 months to process there was a need to expedite those cases which involved potential medal winners ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games.
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“In fact two of these athletes actually recorded some of the highest values ever seen since the IAAF started testing for blood”, he wrote. “No cases were concealed or suppressed; the IAAF simply tackled them in order of importance”.
