Russian Federation to admit a few WADA charges, athletics chief says

“It is essential that we conduct our own internal investigation and – I want to underline – provide the most open professional co-operation with global anti-doping structures”.

The regime of President Vladimir Putin appears to have admitted that a few form of sanctions are coming its way, with Wada’s independent commission recommending that the nation’s athletes be banned from all worldwide competitions.

Russian officials have dismissed doping allegations against their country’s athletes and and have criticised British officials for not catching cheaters during the last Olympic Games in London.

Key sources for the accusations against him are testimony from two athletes, marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova and Yulia Stepanova, who provided investigators with e-mails in which Portugalov allegedly prescribed specific doping products.

The Russian doping scandal entered the arena of worldwide diplomacy Thursday as the Foreign Ministry slammed the published report as “biased” and “politicized”. “We in Russian Federation should do everything to get rid of this problem”.

The report suggested the laboratory had “been involved in a widespread cover-up” of positive doping tests and stated that 1,417 samples which the WADA had wanted kept were targeted for “intentional and malicious destruction”.

But Mikhail Butov, the Russian athletics federation’s secretary general, conceded that doping is an issue.

Meanwhile, Lamine Diack, the former IAAF president, resigned from his position as an honorary member of the worldwide Olympic Committee.

Any ban would stay in place until Russian Federation proves itself compliant with the Wada code, with the first event they are set to miss being the European Cross-Country Championships in France next month.

“It is necessary to protect our athletes from the use of illegal drugs”.

Response from stakeholders and sports fans to the WADA report has been both personal and political.

Bach pulled back from an earlier expression of apparent support for Russian Federation, whose sports leaders have fought back rather than accepted the allegations detailed in a damning World Anti-Doping Agency report on Monday. There should be a similar investigation into countries like Kenya and Ethiopia too. Many Russian politicians called it politically motivated. “Yet their levels of testing are very limited”.

“The Moscow Laboratory is provisionally suspended, and the status of the laboratory’s accreditation beyond that will be decided by a Disciplinary Committee which will be formed shortly to review the case”.