Moscow (AFP)
Four Russian athletes including world champions Maria Lasitskene and Sergey Shubenkov opened hostilities against their federation, which they accuse of having done nothing to avoid a suspension, by launching an Instagram page on Tuesday that will recount their fight.
The four athletes are members of the sports commission of the Russian athletics federation (Rusaf), a body previously dormant that they want to relaunch to accelerate the changes at the head of the Rusaf.
"Dear Russian athletes, the Rusaf Athletes' Commission has created this page to keep in touch with you (...) It will contain all the information on the measures that the commission will take to change the current situation of Russian athletics. Let's be active together! "Says the inaugural message on the Instagram page.
Russia was banned in December from four years of international sports competition for falsifying anti-doping data, the latest episode in a massive institutional doping scandal. The athletics federation has already been suspended since November 2015 and its reintegration process was suspended in November 2019, on the background of suspicions of "obstruction of an investigation" targeting its leaders.
Besides Maria Lasitskene, triple world champion in high jump, and Sergey Shubenkov, world champion in 110 m hurdles, the creators of the Instagram page are the world pole vault champion Anzhelika Sidorova and the former hammer thrower Sergey Litvinov.
At the end of December, the first three cities had written an open letter to the leaders of the Russian Athletics Federation in which they criticized the recent actions of the Rusaf and called for more transparency.
"Everyone, except apparently the management of Rusaf, has already understood that World Athletics (ex-IAAF) will not take any action until the current leaders of our federation are replaced," they wrote in particular.
"What steps have been taken in the past month and a half to resume the process of obtaining neutrality status (for athletes)? Who did you write to? Who wrote these letters? What responses did you they received you? "they asked again in this open letter.
© 2020 AFP