Lausanne (AFP)
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) will render its decision on Thursday afternoon in the vast scandal of repeated cheating between Russia and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), he announced on Wednesday.
"A press release including the details of the CAS sentence will be issued" at 4:00 p.m. local time, or 3:00 p.m. GMT, on the sports court's website, the court said.
After four days of hearings in early November, the three arbitrators appointed by the CAS will decide whether Russia should be excluded for four years from international competitions, as demanded by the world anti-doping gendarme since December 2019.
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.
WADA has therefore drawn from the range of sanctions provided for since 2018 by its arsenal: it 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 of the couple of whistleblowers Stepanov on athletics.
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 admitted 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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