Montreal (AFP)
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has decided to relocate from Paris to Lausanne (Switzerland) the meeting on December 9 of its executive committee on Russia, because of the planned strike in France, announced Monday a spokesman.
"We had to move the meeting because of the strikes and the many potential disruptions, which made the logistics difficult, so we had to relocate to Lausanne," WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald told AFP.
Several French unions have called for a protracted strike from Thursday against the controversial pension reform advocated by President Emmanuel Macron and which is likely to be followed and paralyze the country, including public transport.
WADA also spoke of an "impending general strike in Paris".
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.
According to the Compliance Review Committee (CRC), Russia has removed "hundreds" of suspicious anti-doping 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.
Russia had already been excluded from the Rio-2016 and Pyeongchang-2018 Olympics because of this vast institutional doping system implemented at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
© 2019 AFP