WADA suspend ‘non-compliant’ Russian Anti-Doping Agency

While the World Anti-Doping Agency geared up to suspend Russia’s anti-doping operation, calls for investigation into that country’s entire sports program came from athletes and leaders outside of track and field who worry their sports have been tainted, too.

Russia’s sporting reputation was in tatters and drug cheats around the world put on notice on Wednesday as an emboldened World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) vowed to step up the war on performance-enhancing drugs.

LONDON, Nov 13 Athletics’ governing body has voted overwhelmingly to suspend Russian Federation from the sport for widespread, state-sponsored doping and the ban will include the 2016 Olympics unless the country can demonstrate a major change in their approach and controls. “I’m usually very cautious and, when I’m investigating criminals, usually they disguise their paths, but we heard from athletes saying, “I don’t care as nothing will happen as usual”.

But Russian sports authorities have remained adamant that the country’s track and field athletes will be at the Olympics, pledging to restore the country’s IAAF membership within three months.

Russian deputy minister of sport Pavel Kolobkov said his country is on board with the reforms needed to bring his country in compliance.

The hard part for the World Anti-Doping Agency was, well, everything else.

A WADA report released last week recommended firm action against RUSADA following the decision to withdraw accreditation from the Moscow Anti-Doping laboratory.

It’s clear it will take more than the $26 million that WADA operates on each year to do the sort of work being done by the independent commission probing corruption in the Russian track system. “This is our principal position and we’re going to insist on it”, the ROC president stressed.

As well as Alyoshin, who has previously represented Russia in managing UNESCO’s anti-doping fund, the taskforce also contains representatives of the Russian badminton and modern pentathlon federations, the Sports Ministry, lawyers and Olympic gold medal-winning synchronized swimmer Olga Brusnikina.

“I feel for the longest time”, Montano said, “I tried not to think about it not being fair”.

WADA’s representative from New Zealand agreed with Scott’s proposal and said he would like to see it adopted. Andorra and Israel did not have the 2015 WADA code compliant rules in place. He said there is a high probability that athletes in other sports in Russian Federation were involved in the country’s doping program.