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Putin meeting over Russian Federation doping claims
Bach said recently-appointed IAAF president Coe was the right man to clean up the sport with less than a year to go to the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
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The World Anti-Doping Agency commission set up to investigate doping in Russian Federation said even the country’s intelligence service, the FSB, was involved, spying on Moscow’s anti-doping lab, including during last year’s Olympics in Sochi.
“I agree that this is not only a Russian problem, but if our foreign colleagues have questions, they should be answered, and it must be done in the open”.
Trofimov says Isinbayeva has never had any involvement with doping and “athletes who are clean should not suffer”.
“There are athletes who take doping to enhance their performance”.
Firstly, Lord Coe and the IAAF are still waiting upon an official reply from the Russian authorities.
‘Not decorative’ The Russian sports minister said the idea was absurd, telling the news agency Interfax; “As a member of the Fifa executive committee and president of the Russian Football Union, I can say that I’m not decorative, unlike [Dyke], and I’ve done a fair amount, this needs to be respected”.
Bach said the issue – which he described as a “malfunctioning of a country” – was now in the hands of the global Association of Athletics Federation.
“It’s worse than we thought”, Pound said. “We’ve got a problem with doping”, he admitted to the BBC.
WADA’s report also accused Russian Federation of “sabotaging” the London Olympics in 2012, and Mutko hit out at the United Kingdom for their procedures during the event.
The 350-page report claimed the director of the Moscow laboratory at the centre of the allegations, Grigory Rodchenkov, who has since resigned, was key to a “conspiracy to extort money from athletes in order to cover up positive doping test results”. The IAAF, the sport’s world governing body, is expected to provisionally suspend Russian athletics during a formal council disciplinary hearing tomorrow.
Bach said the IOC had already pledged to withdraw Olympic medals from any Russian athletes named in the WADA report who are found guilty of doping and exclude athletes and coaches from future Olympics.
“We should have confidence in the work of WADA as we are now having confidence in this report of the WADA commission”, he said.
The sports leaders have instead arranged a meeting in the city of Mineralnye Vody with Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov. There should be a similar investigation into countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, too.
In turn, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko called for a more comprehensive approach to the fight against doping. “Yet their levels of testing are very limited”, Andrey Baranov said on Wednesday. Ultimately, however, the IAAF must balance this with the need to make a big statement displaying a no tolerance attitude to doping – especially at this alleged scale – and with athletics’ name being dragged through the mud, it is likely to suffer potentially alienating young participants, fans, broadcasters and sponsors.
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If Russian Federation is banned from competing in Rio, as many are urging, it will be a huge blow to the country and the Putin government, which spent $51 billion to host the Sochi Winter Olympics previous year.