Lausanne (AFP)
Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, said on Thursday that he did not want to "speculate" on the decision of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to decide on Monday a possible exclusion of Russia from international competitions. the Tokyo Olympics 2020.
If the WADA Executive Committee confirms at the meeting in Lausanne the long list of measures recommended to it by its Conformity Review Committee (CRC), Russia would be simply ostracized from international sport, with exclusion of competitions, including the Tokyo-2020 Olympics and the Beijing-2022 Winter Olympic Games.
"I am not in a position to speculate, I do not know the details of the decision that WADA could take," Bach said Thursday after a three-day meeting of the Executive Board.
"I hope that WADA will be clear about the events that this decision will refer to and why it applies or not - it's in the hands of WADA, and in particular the CRC," he said. Bach, adding that WADA's decisions would be binding on the IOC, which is "a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Code".
According to the CRC, Russia has removed "hundreds" of suspicious anti-doping test results from its files sent to WADA earlier this year. However, the delivery of these data was a prerequisite for lifting previous sanctions against the Russian anti-doping agency (Rusada), at the heart of an institutional doping system between 2011 and 2015.
The Russian Olympic Committee had been excluded from the Pyeongchang-2018 winter Olympics on the basis of the McLaren report's findings on manipulations during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. A Russian team had however been able to participate under the title of "Russian Olympic athletes".
In late November, following the publication of CRC's recommendations, the IOC said in a statement that it would support the "harshest" sanctions against "all those responsible for this manipulation".
© 2019 AFP