Russia’s doping troubles are nowhere near over. After a head-snapping day of developments from Moscow to Tokyo to the Middle East, the country has new fears that its status at next year’s Olympics could be in jeopardy — and no doubt about where it stands in track and field.
“It just reinforces everything,” Rune Andersen, the head of track’s task force on Russian doping, said Monday in Qatar after recommending that the country’s federation remain barred during this week’s world championships.
Earlier Monday, the World Anti-Doping Agency had announced during its meeting in Tokyo that it was giving Russia three weeks to explain what looked like manipulation of critical data from its Moscow lab, which was not matching up with data WADA received from a whistleblower who helped break open the Russian doping scandal in 2016.
The lab data was key to prosecuting cases stemming from Russia’s intricate plot to give its athletes performance enhancers in preparation for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and other big events, while preventing them from getting caught.
Andersen’s report for track’s governing body, the IAAF, offered a detailed accounting of the data case that WADA had made public earlier. It said the discrepancies “are not random. In many cases, they relate to positive findings that appear” in the database provided by the whistleblower.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Russian officials took a dreary view of the developments, which could lead to the country’s anti-doping agency being suspended again, some 12 months after reinstatement upon delivering the lab data to WADA.
“The situation is very serious,” Russian Olympic Committee president Stanislav Pozdnyakov said.
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