Lausanne (AFP)
The Court of Arbitration for Sport hopes to render its decision "by the end of the year" in the vast scandal of repeated cheating between Russia and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), he announced Thursday after the end of the hearing.
The three referees, seized since Monday of this file, "will now deliberate" and will decide whether Russia should be excluded for four years from international competitions, as claimed by WADA since December 2019, explains the court based in Lausanne in a statement .
"Although it is difficult to predict exactly how long this process will take, it is anticipated that the arbitration award will be notified to the parties by the end of the year", continues the CAS, which promises to communicate as soon as possible. as possible a more precise date.
The stake, in this unprecedented case for sports justice, is to validate or not the panoply of sanctions proposed by WADA and refused by the Russian anti-doping agency, Rusada, due to the rigging of the computer files of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory. for the period 2011-2015.
After demanding this data to ensure Russian good faith, the Montreal sleuths discovered two types of manipulation: the removal of multiple traces of positive doping controls and the introduction of false exchanges aimed at compromising Grigory Rodchenkov, ex- director of the laboratory who became WADA's main informant, and two of his deputies.
The anti-doping gendarme has therefore drawn from the range of sanctions provided for since 2018 by his arsenal: he intends to ban the Russian flag for four years from major sporting events, including the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Beijing (winter / 2022) and Paris (summer / 2024), and forbid the country to organize any on its soil.
Only Russian athletes will be able to compete who will demonstrate their absence of recourse to doping, under a neutral banner and according to modalities which remain to be specified.
Going beyond this single computer fraud, the Russian litigation has been going on since 2010 and the revelations on the athleticism of the couple of whistleblowers Stepanov.
It involves the secret services and the Russian Ministry of Sports.
Forced to resign from the Moscow laboratory and a refugee in the United States, Grigory Rodchenkov confessed in spring 2016 to having orchestrated for years the concealment of doping, describing in detail the system put in place at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi to deceive observers of WADA.
The scientist and his team hid the urine bottles of Russian athletes through a "mouse hole" leading to a member of the FSB, the Russian secret service.
The spy, disguised as a cleaner, unsealed the supposedly tamper-proof cap with a surgeon's tool, then replaced the contents with "clean" urine stored beforehand.
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