Russia is excluded for two years from major world competitions, including the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, for violating anti-doping rules, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS ).
The three referees appointed by CAS have halved the sanction proposed last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which was to be four years, while leaving Russian athletes never sanctioned for doping the possibility of themselves. line up under neutral banner.
“WADA is pleased to have won this landmark case,” said WADA President Witold Banka.
The CAS "clearly confirmed our conclusions that the Russian authorities brazenly and illegally manipulated data from the Moscow laboratory in order to cover up an institutionalized doping program," he added in a statement, while saying to himself "Disappointed" that the court did not retain the length of suspension recommended by WADA.
"Need to promote a culture change"
The "consequences" of the Russian cheating, that is to say the large-scale rigging of the computer data of the anti-doping laboratory in Moscow, "are not as important as what WADA wanted", estimated the referees in their decision.
To justify their leniency, they say they have "taken into account questions of proportionality" of the sanctions, "and in particular, the need to promote a culture change and to encourage the next generation of Russian athletes to participate in international sport. clean ".
Clearly, athletes were largely preserved from the collective sanction demanded by WADA and which initially included three editions of the Olympic Games, until Paris-2024, potentially ending the careers of many of them.
An impact on the World Cup in Qatar?
If the suspension applies until December 16, 2022, its effects on the World Cup which will end in Qatar two days later are not yet clear: Russian athletes can certainly compete under a neutral banner, but the press release from TAS does not specify how this tolerance can be applied to team sports.
In addition, the court ordered Rusada, the Russian anti-doping agency, to pay 1.27 million dollars (approximately one million euros) to WADA to reimburse the expertises carried out since January 2019 on the rigging of laboratory data. from Moscow.
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The world anti-doping policeman had already committed nearly 4 million dollars (3.3 million euros) in 2015 and 2016 in two other investigations on institutionalized doping in Russia, and in particular on the cheating put in place during the 2014 Olympics in Sochi with the help of the Russian secret service.
Thirty sports would have been concerned between 2011 and 2015
On November 9, 2015, 10 months after the revelations of the German channel ARD and the Stepanov spouses, exiled Russian whistleblowers, on large-scale doping, the Canadian Richard Pound published for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) a report damning on Russian athletics: these doping cases could not have "existed" without the consent of the government.
In May 2016, a third whistleblower, the former director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory Grigory Rodchenkov, revealed the cheating system set up at the Sochi Games in 2014. Three weeks before the Olympics, the first part of the report of the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, commissioned by WADA, denounces a "state doping system" extended to thirty sports, between 2011 and 2015, with the active help of the Russian secret services (FSB), notably in Sochi in 2014 and at the World Athletics Championships in Moscow in 2013.
