Tokyo (AFP)

Russia again suspended. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has opened a new case against Moscow, which poses a threat of sanctions just ten months from the Tokyo Olympics.

At the end of a long-awaited executive committee in Tokyo, after initial leaks over the weekend, WADA confirmed that it had opened a "formal compliance procedure against Rusada (the Russian anti-doping agency)" , last September 17 ".

At issue, "inconsistencies" found in the electronic data controls of the former Moscow laboratory. These data, submitted by Russia at the beginning of the year, had just made it possible to get out of the crisis caused by the vast scandal over an institutional doping system that had plagued the country between 2011 and 2015.

The AMA has been investigating this system for almost five years, and the fraud already established, including the two volumes in the report by Canadian jurist Richard McLaren, has led to the ban of the Russian flag and anthem from the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. in Pyeongchang, as well as any international athletics competition since November 2015, including Rio Olympics. Only selections of "neutral" Russian athletes have been admitted.

WADA investigators consider the raw data from the anti-doping tests retrieved from the Russian servers as part of the puzzle that will shed light on what was really happening in the lab, where the results of hundreds of checks were reportedly laundered. Because WADA also has other items from the lab, provided by whistleblowers.

- Tokyo on the horizon -

"Experts looked at (the data) we got from whistleblowers, and what we got from Russia." They noticed some inconsistencies, then they studied the differences, which led to a situation where he There are questions that need to be asked, "WADA Director General Olivier Niggli told AFP after the agency's executive committee in the Japanese capital.

"We have learned that the data provided to WADA by an informant is somewhat different from the copy that WADA experts obtained from Moscow in 2019," Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov said in a statement. communicated.

"Experts from both sides, already in contact, will see what these gaps are due, and we continue to help in every possible way," he added.

Specifically, WADA will investigate whether Russia has provided trafficked data to protect athletes from disciplinary proceedings. Since it has recovered the raw data of the controls, supposed to establish with certainty the doping products and their concentration in the samples at the time, before any human intervention, the AMA was able to transmit dozens of cases to the federations.

"There are already 47 files that continue, which are not affected by any anomalies" confirmed Monday, detailed Olivier Niggli. "There will be more," he promised, while conceding that the inconsistencies in the data provided by Moscow "could affect some issues."

WADA declared Rusada non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code in November 2015, but despite new revelations about the scale of the scandal shortly before the Rio 2016 Olympics, its calls to ban Russia had not been heard by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had left it up to the sports federations to decide. However, only the International Federation of Athletics had raised a red flag.

Now, WADA has new powers that can lead it, as a last resort, to ban a country from participating in the Olympic Games. But these sanctions would ultimately be examined and confirmed or not by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne. The Tokyo Olympics are scheduled from July 24 to August 9, 2020.

New sanctions? "It is too early" to say, warned Olivier Niggli, confirming that the last word will return to the CAS.

© 2019 AFP