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2015 Russian Doping Scandal
Topic Started: Nov 10 2015, 07:35 PM (64 Views)
Webster
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NBC Sports: Russia Should Be Banned From Track & Field, WADA Panel Says

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GENEVA (AP) — Russian track and field athletes could be banned from next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro after a devastatingly critical report accused the country’s government of complicity in widespread doping and cover-ups.

The World Anti-Doping Agency commission set up to investigate doping in Russia 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.

The commission chaired by Dick Pound recommended that WADA immediately declare the Russian athletics federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition. “It’s worse than we thought,” Pound said. “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”

The IAAF responded immediately, saying it will consider sanctions against Russia, including a possible suspension of the athletics federation that would ban Russian track and field athletes from international competition, including the Olympics.

“If they are suspended — and it sounds like the IAAF is moving in that direction already — and they are still suspended, at the time of Rio there will be no Russian track and field athletes there,” Pound said in an interview with The Associated Press after the release of his commission’s findings.

He said Russia’s doping could be called state-sponsored. “They would certainly have known,” he said of Russian officials. To the AP, he added: “We have finally identified one of the major powers as being involved in this. It’s not just small countries or little pockets. This is a major sporting country. It’s got to be a huge embarrassment.”

The gold and bronze-medal winners at 800 meters at the London Olympics are among five Russian runners targeted for lifetime bans. The commission recommended lifetime bans for Olympic champion Mariya Savinova-Farnosova and bronze medalist Ekaterina Poistogova.

South African Caster Semenya, she of the gender-testing controversy, took silver between the Russians in the 2012 Olympic 800m. American Alysia Montaño was fifth.

“I don’t have any medals in my hands still yet, but with the findings it looks promising, and I’m very, very hopeful,” Montaño said on Periscope, crossing her fingers during a nine-minute video. “Here’s to retribution and to justice being served.”

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, whose ministry was accused by the WADA probe of giving orders to cover up doping violations, insisted Russia’s problems are no worse than in other countries and said Russia is being persecuted, telling the Interfax news agency: “Whatever we do, everything is bad.” He threatened to cut all government funding for anti-doping work, saying “if we have to close this whole system, we would be happy to” because “we will only save money.”

The acting president of the Russian athletics federation, Vadim Zelichenok, said he does not believe doping there is systematic or that the government or security services helped to cover up cases.

The WADA commission said the International Olympic Committee should not accept any entries from the Russian athletics federation until the body has been declared complaint with WADA’s doping code and a suspension has been lifted.

Pound said there may still be time for Russia to avoid the “nuclear weapon” of a ban from the Olympics, if it starts reforming immediately. That work that will take at least “several months” and “there are a lot of people who are going to have to walk the plank before this happens,” he said. “I think they can do it. I hope they can,” he added.

More damaging revelations are to come. The WADA commission is also looking at the role senior officials at the IAAF allegedly played in bribery and extortion involving Russian athletes. French authorities last week detained and later charged former IAAF President Lamine Diack with corruption and money laundering. The WADA commission’s findings on that angle could come before the end of the year.

As it was, the WADA report on Monday said “widespread inaction” by the IAAF and Russian authorities allowed athletes suspected of doping to continue competing. “(The) Olympic Games in London were, in a sense, sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing, and could have been prevented from competing,” it said.

The commission accused the Russian state of complicity. It said its months-long probe found no written evidence of government involvement, but it added: “It would be naive in the extreme to conclude that activities on the scale discovered could have occurred without the explicit or tacit approval of Russian governmental authorities.”

The findings prompted a damning response from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that brought down Lance Armstrong, another case that shattered public faith in sports. “If Russia has created an organized scheme of state-supported doping, then they have no business being allowed to compete on the world stage,” USADA CEO Travis Tygart said.

The WADA probe found that agents from the FSB even infiltrated Russia’s anti-doping work at the Sochi Olympics. One witness told the inquiry that “in Sochi, we had some guys pretending to be engineers in the lab but actually they were from the federal security service.”

Staff at Russia’s anti-doping lab in Moscow believed their offices were bugged by the FSB and an FSB agent, thought to be Evgeniy Blotkin or Blokhin, regularly visited. This was part of a wider pattern of “direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state with the Moscow laboratory operations,” the report said.

Pound said Mutko, the sports minister, must also have known. “It was not possible for him to be unaware of it,” Pound said.

Mutko, who is also a FIFA executive committee member and leads the 2018 World Cup organizing committee, denied wrongdoing to the WADA inquiry panel, including knowledge of athletes being blackmailed and FSB intelligence agents interfering in lab work.

The WADA report also said Moscow testing laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov ordered 1,417 doping control samples to be destroyed to deny evidence for the inquiry. It said Rodchenkov “personally instructed and authorized” the destruction of evidence three days before a WADA audit team arrived in Moscow last December.

The WADA panel said it wanted to send the Russian athletes’ samples to labs in other countries to detect banned drugs and doping methods. The panel also raised suspicions that Russia may have has been using an obscure laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow to help cover up doping, possibly by pre-screening athletes’ samples and ditching those that test positive.

It said whistleblowers and confidential witnesses “corroborated that this second laboratory is involved in the destruction and the cover-up of what would otherwise be positive doping tests.”

The panel also said it does not believe that the doping problem is limited to athletics or to Russian sports. Pound singled out Kenya, saying it seems the East African powerhouse of long-distance running “has a real problem.” “In its considered view,” the commission said, “Russia is not the only country, nor athletics the only sport, facing the problem of orchestrated doping.”
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Webster
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More links....
ABC Sports: Russian Ministry 'Not Surprised' by WADA Report
NBC Sports: IOC May Strip Medals In Russian Doping Case
Wikipedia: Doping at the Olympic Games - 2012 London Olympics
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Webster
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Sydney Morning Herald: IAAF Votes Overwhelmingly To Ba Russia Over Doping

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Calling it a wake-up call for a sport in a "shameful" position, IAAF president Sebastian Coe said Russia would be banned from next year's Olympics unless it convinces the world it has cleaned up its act.

The sport's governing body provisionally suspended Russia's track and field federation, four days after the country was accused of operating a vast state-sponsored doping program in a report by a World Anti-Doping Agency commission.

The move bars Russia from international track and field competition for an indefinite period, including the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, until the country is judged to have fixed its problems and fallen into line with global anti-doping rules.

Coe called the decision – approved 22-1 in a secret vote of the IAAF council via teleconference – "the toughest sanction we can apply at this time". It's the first time the International Association of Athletics Federations has ever banned a country over its doping failures. "The whole system has failed the athletes, not just in Russia but around the world," Coe said after a meeting that lasted nearly 3 hours. "This has been a shameful wake-up call and we are clear that cheating at any level will not be tolerated.

"It makes me angry," added Coe, a two-time Olympic 1500-metre champion from Britain. Coe, who was elected IAAF president in August, had been under heavy pressure to take tough action, despite efforts by Russian officials to avoid a blanket ban by agreeing to co-operate and make reforms in their anti-doping system. "This is not about politics, this is about protection of clean athletes," Coe said.

Coe added Russia will need to fulfil "a list of criteria" to win reinstatement. An independent inspection team led by Norwegian anti-doping expert Rune Andersen will be appointed in the next few days to verify Russia's progress.

Still uncertain is whether the Russian federation will be able to reform in time for its athletes to compete at the Rio Games, which run from August 5-21. Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said he is hopeful Russia will be able to compete at the world indoor championships in Portland, Oregon, from March 17-20.

"Anyway, the main thing is the Olympics," he said. Unless the Russian federation voluntarily accepts a full suspension, the IAAF will hold a hearing to elevate the provisional penalty to a full suspension.

Russia will also be stripped of hosting the world race walking team championships in Cheboksary from May 7-15, and the world junior championships in Kazan from July 19-24.

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. WADA called the IAAF decision "positive news for clean athletes worldwide".

It came on the same day that a WADA committee found Russia's national anti-doping agency to be non-compliant with its code. The findings will go to the WADA foundation board, which will vote on it on Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Colorado. WADA has already suspended the anti-doping laboratory in Moscow.

Coe announced that Paul Deighton, who served as chief executive of the organising committee for the 2012 London Olympics, will oversee a program of reform of the IAAF's governance.
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Webster
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....looks like the ongoing Russian sports doping scandal could ensnare more problems for them....

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(NBC Sports) The IAAF says the inspection team monitoring Russia’s anti-doping reforms will report back in late March, meaning the national track team would miss the World Indoor Championships in the United States.

The March 17-20 championships in Portland, Oregon, are the first major competition that Russia would miss under its provisional suspension from the IAAF.

The indefinite ban was imposed last week after Russia was accused by an independent World-Anti-Doping Agency commission of running a state-sponsored doping program.

Russian officials have said they hope to return to competition in less than three months.

But the IAAF said Thursday it has set a date of March 27 — a week after the Portland championships end — for its inspectors to deliver their first report to the governing council.

Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva had said she hoped to return to competition by February after missing all of the 2014 season while having a baby.

-Read more: http://olympics.nbcsports.com/2015/11/18/wada-russia-doping-agency-non-compliant/
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Webster
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.....given Russia's history in Olympic sports, we'll believe this one when we see it....

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(NBC Sports) MOSCOW (AP) Russia says it will follow any recommendations from the World Anti-Doping Agency to clean up its own troubled drug-testing body.

A WADA commission’s report this month accused the Russian anti-doping agency, RUSADA, of covering up failed drug tests by top athletes. RUSADA was suspended by WADA following the report’s publication.

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko met WADA director general David Howman in Germany on Thursday.

According to an account of the meeting posted by the ministry, Mutko said Russia would “follow all recommendations from WADA aimed at the necessary transformations in the activities and structure of RUSADA.” The ministry also quoted Howman as saying he welcomed Mutko’s assurances “with pleasure.”

Russia’s track and field team was also suspended this month by the IAAF and could miss next year’s Olympics in Brazil.
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BBC Sport: UK Anti-Doping Agency To Help WADA In Russia
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UK Anti-Doping has said it will help the World Anti-Doping Agency carry out reforms in Russia.

Russia was banned from international competition in November after a Wada commission examined claims of widespread doping, cover-ups and and extortion.

A Ukad spokesperson said: "Ukad has been asked by Wada to be part of an evaluation visit to Russia. It will explore ways and means of how an anti-doping programme can be run."

Russia, which said in November it is "fully committed" to reforms, faces exclusion from next year's Rio Olympics if not declared compliant.

Wada began work in Moscow on Thursday, with Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov confirming that the agency would "determine which international organisations will oversee doping controls in the country".

The Russian anti-doping agency, Rusada, and the anti-doping laboratory were suspended after the Wada report.

Ukad will look into how a Russian anti-doping programme could work "during a period of non-compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code".
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