Russia to miss Olympics 2020 after doping ban

LAUSANNE: Russia will miss next year’s Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games after the World Anti-Doping Agency banned the country from global sporting events for four years over manipulated doping data.

WADA’s executive committee decided that Russia be handed the four-year suspension after accusing Moscow of falsifying laboratory doping data handed over to investigators earlier this year.

Russia will be ruled out of the next Olympics in Tokyo. Russian government officials will be barred from attending any major events, while the country will lose the right to host, or even bid, for tournaments.

“WADA’s executive committee approved unanimously to assert a non-compliance on the Russian anti-doping agency for a period of four years,” WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald said.

Russian sportsmen and women will still be allowed to compete at the Olympics next year but only if they can demonstrate that they were not part of what WADA believes was a state-sponsored system of doping.

“They are going to have prove they had nothing to do with the non-compliance, (that) they were not involved in the doping schemes as described by the McLaren report, or they did not have their samples affected by the manipulation,” Fitzgerald said.

The independent report by Richard McLaren, released in 2016, revealed the significant extent of state-sponsored doping in Russia, notably between 2011 and 2015.

It led to the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) being suspended for nearly three years previously over revelations of a vast state-supported doping programme.

The full disclosure of data from the Moscow laboratory was a key condition of Russia’s controversial reinstatement by WADA in September 2018.

The WADA decision was widely predicted with the body’s president having made a presentation to the Olympic Summit on Saturday that strongly condemned those responsible for the manipulation of the data from the Moscow laboratory.

“It was agreed that this was an attack on sport and that these actions should lead to the toughest sanctions against those responsible,” the IOC said in a statement.

“It was stressed by the participants that full justice must be finally done so that the guilty ones can be properly punished and the innocent ones are fully protected.”

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked that the Russian authorities deliver the fully authenticated raw data. A majority of WADA’s influential athlete committee had called for a complete ban on Russian participation.