Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, speaking to The Associated Press on Thursday in a telephone interview, said there will “not in any case… never” be a boycott. It said officials at all levels of sport were party to the cheating.
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But the offer by Federation president Vadim Zelichenok failed to sway the council yesterday and could open the door to exclusion from next year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
The suspension was approved by a 22-1 vote during a teleconference of the 27-member council of the IAAF. This is the first time the IAAF has suspended a nation because of doping concerns.
“This is a wake-up call for all of us”, said IAAF president Lord Coe. “So I have reiterated that doping abuse is not the problem of a country or even of athletics, it is a problem of sport and we can find a solution only by joining efforts”. The athletes will work together to continue the process of cleaning up athletics to ensure those athletes training and competing cleanly are not tainted by the minority.
“We send a clear message to clean athletes in a dirty system to report any doping or cheating that they see or hear about”. However, Russian Federation could regain membership to the IAAF by fulfilling “a list of criteria” subject to IAAF inspection. That team will be lead by Rune Andersen, an independent worldwide anti-doping expert and three members of the IAAF Council who will be appointed in the next few days.
The report concluded that the Russian track federation should be banned from competition, but Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin say that would constitute unfair collective punishment. “Our verification team will be tough and will make sure if there is an introduction for those athletes, that changes have been made”.
“But we don’t want to scrub Russian athletics off the world map and we will not accept such a decision”.
“Anyway, the main thing is the Olympics”, he said.
In addition, Russian Federation will not host the 2016 World Race Walking Cup and 2016 World Junior Championships as planned.
Russian athletes are eligible to compete in their own national events during the ban.
Russia’s IAAF council member, Mikhail Butov, addressed Friday’s meeting but did not take part in the vote.
“It is the strongest sanction that we could apply tonight”, he said. “We are all on the same page”, Svein Arne Hansen, the president of European Athletics, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “It’s about protecting the athletes with clean consciences”. He had previously said Russian Federation is prepared to follow WADA recommendations, the news agency reported.
The committee’s findings will go to the WADA foundation board, which will vote on them at its meeting Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
It told Cycling Weekly, “WADA’s decision to provisionally suspend the Moscow laboratory will have a marginal impact on UCI’s anti-doping activities since the CADF, the independent body mandated by the UCI to plan and carry out anti-doping in cycling, had very limited use of Moscow’s facilities for the screening of samples”.
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French prosecutors charged former IAAF President Lamine Diack last week with taking bribes from Russian sports officials to hide positive doping results, according to media reports.
