IAAF taskforce head: Russian Federation trying to reform on doping

Russian Federation was suspended by the IAAF from worldwide competition, including the Olympics, in November after a report by a World Anti-Doping Agency accused Russian Federation of having a state-sponsored doping programme.

MOSCOW (AP) – Russia is making efforts to reform after its damaging doping scandal, according to the head of the IAAF taskforce set up to determine whether the country’s ban from global track and field should be lifted. The person requested anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to release the documents.

In addition, the body said it will invest in a new anti-doping education program for elite athletes and be a “strong voice within the IAAF to make sure it stays on the course” set by its president, Sebastian Coe.

By 2011, two years after the IAAF launched its “blood passport” testing regimen, it was starting to flag so many suspected Russian athletes as dopers that IAAF officials explored the idea of breaking their own and WADA’s rules by dealing with some cases privately, two notes obtained by The AP show.

Norwegian anti-doping expert Rune Andersen, who heads the IAAF taskforce, held meetings Monday and Tuesday in Moscow with Russian government and sports officials.

Abnormal blood levels are not enough for an athlete to be punished for a doping offence but are widely seen as indicating possible performance-enhancing drug use.

The documents reveal how the IAAF cajoled Russian officials to act, but also used advances in blood testing against offenders.

Documents uncovered by the Associated Press show the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) warned Russian athletics chiefs in 2009 that the blood levels of their athletes were “putting their health and even their own lives in very serious danger”.

– Internal IAAF papers before the London Olympics proposed hiding doping sanctions for lesser-known Russians.

Former IAAF President Lamine Diack faces corruption and money laundering charges in France after being implicated in a scheme to blackmail athletes and cover up their positive doping results. The front-runner is longtime general secretary Mikhail Butov, who also sits on the IAAF’s ruling council.

Before the 2009 world championships, Weiss told Balakhnichev that Russian athletes were evading tests with the excuse that they were serving in the Russian military and could not give their whereabouts.

The IAAF told AP the letters were genuine.

The IAAF says the proposals were never put into place, a statement Balakhnichev confirmed in an interview with the AP.

He added if there had been “no start” rules at the world championships for athletes with abnormal blood readings, seven Russian competitors and two gold medallists would have been prevented from competing.

But the second group of lower-level athletes could be sanctioned in a “rapid and discreet” manner, working in “close collaboration” with Russian Federation and without informing the public, it proposes.

A month after the 2012 Olympics, the AP report said, an internal brief prepared for Diack estimated that 42 percent of tested Russian elite athletes were doping.

Yet it took the publication of the Wada report – based on the evidence of a 2014 German TV documentary – for the IAAF to rule that “the whole system has failed the athletes, not just in Russian Federation, but around the world”.

“There were no secret bans. At least I didn’t know and didn’t hear about there being any”. The 2012 follow-up note was from Dolle to Diack, Turner said. Every athlete who tested positive, Turner added, “was investigated and has either been sanctioned or is now going through a legal process as part of being sanctioned”.

But the note said it would be “impossible” to take this approach with Russia’s best athletes without their absence raising questions, so their bans would have to be made public.

A WADA spokesman on Wednesday said the suggestions in the AP story, if accurate, were “most concerning”.