Russia avoids new doping penalties over missed deadline

RUSADA (Russia's Anti-Doping Agency) chief Yury Ganus gives a press conference in Moscow on January 22, 2019. The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) is investigating claims Russian officials tried to cover up a doping case involving high jumper Danil Lysenko, following a report in Britain's Sunday Times. PHOTO | VASILY MAXIMOV |

What you need to know:

  • But when a Wada team arrived last month, Russian authorities raised issues with the certification of their equipment under Russian law.
  • Wada officials finally gained access two weeks later and confirmed they had "successfully retrieved" all the data.

MONTREAL

Russia remains under scrutiny even though it will not be punished for missing a December deadline to allow access to the Moscow laboratory at the centre of alleged state-sponsored doping, the World Anti Doping Agency said Tuesday.

Wada's Executive Committee decided to take no further action at a meeting earlier in the day and the agency announced the decision in a press release followed by a press conference.

"Several members of the (Executive Committee) voiced their disappointment that the deadline had been missed but agreed that no sanction in that regard should be imposed," Wada President Craig Reedie said.

Wada had conditionally lifted a ban on RUSADA in September last year, with one of the conditions being the granting of access to thousands of samples at the tainted Moscow lab by the end of 2018.

But when a Wada team arrived last month, Russian authorities raised issues with the certification of their equipment under Russian law.

Reedie and Jonathan Taylor, who heads Wada's Compliance Review Committee, both said that the agency had followed its rules and precedents set in other cases.

"Data was provided late. Data was provided after the deadline," Taylor said, before adding: "We decided this case should be treated the same as others."

Reedie said "significant progress" had been made in "resolving the Russian doping matter", but Wada warned though that if any doping data from Russia was tampered with, it would take swift action.

"If that review were to confirm tampering, the CRC would consider that to be extremely serious non-compliance and can be expected to recommend that WADA pursues the most stringent sanctions."

Gunter Younger, Director of the Wada Intelligence and Investigations Department, explained in a letter that his team of experts "have obtained a forensic image of the entire central server".

Russian authorities are accused of tampering with doping samples. Younger was asked if the data could also have been altered.

"It's complicated to (tamper with) the individual documents because they need to be consistent, but we are not too naive. We are going to look for any hints of falsification of the data," he told the press conference.
Younger said that Wada had collected data from the lab's server and central database and 19 testing instruments and could compare them with the database provided by a whistle blower in 2017.

"We have identified the most suspicious cases - we know what we are looking for," Younger said. "The next step is to get the raw data out of the Moscow data and see if they are consistent with what we have."

"There should be the same substances in the samples as in our data," he added.

"We will not stop until we have investigated every case that we regard as very suspicious."

This is the latest chapter in an affair that surfaced with Richard McLaren's July 2016 report detailing doping in Russia from 2011 to 2015 involving more than 1,000 athletes across more than 30 sports.

The Canadian lawyer's damning revelations led to Russia's athletics team being barred from the 2016 Rio Olympics and Russian competitors exiled from the 2018 Winter Games.