Russia / Doping: two years of exclusion by CAS from world competitions
Russia is excluded for two years from major world competitions, including the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, for violating anti-doping rules Brendan Smialowski AFP / Archives
Text by: Farid Achache Follow
4 min
The Lausanne Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), "supreme court" of world sport, has just excluded Russia for two years from major world competitions on Thursday, December 17, including the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 and those Winter in Beijing in 2022, for breaking anti-doping rules.
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The three referees appointed by CAS have halved the sanction proposed last year by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which was to be four years, while leaving Russian athletes never sanctioned for doping the possibility of themselves. line up under neutral banner.
The "
consequences
" of Russian cheating, that is, the large-scale rigging of computer data from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, "
are not as great as WADA wanted
", the referees acknowledged in their decision.
The CAS ordered Rusada, the Russian anti-doping agency, to pay around one million euros to WADA to reimburse the expertises carried out since January 2019 on the rigging of data from the Moscow laboratory.
Athletes largely protected from collective sanction
After four days of a closed-door hearing in early November, the arbitrators say they have "
taken into account questions of proportionality
" of the sanctions, "
and in particular, the need to promote a culture change and to encourage the next generation of Russian athletes to participate in a clean international sport
”, to justify their leniency.
Athletes were largely preserved from the collective sanction demanded by WADA, which initially included three editions of the Olympics, until Paris 2024, potentially ending the careers of many of them.
If the suspension applies until December 16, 2022, its effects on the World Cup which will end in Qatar two days later are not yet clear: Russian athletes can certainly compete under a neutral banner, but the press release from TAS does not specify how this tolerance can be applied to team sports.
A victory "
landmark
"
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the federations awaited clear directives from the CAS, seven months from the Tokyo Olympics, in order to avoid the problems of recent years in the Russian dossier.
Before the Rio Games in 2016, WADA had recommended the exclusion of Russian athletes refused by the IOC, while a few days before the opening of the Pyeongchang Games in 2018, the CAS had cleared 28 Russian athletes suspended for life. by the IOC.
In Rio, in the athletics stadium, only the long jumper Daria Klishina is allowed to compete under a neutral flag.
Ten years ago, Russian middle-distance runner Yuliya Stepanova and her husband Vitaly, ex-controller of Rusada, alerted WADA to institutionalized doping in Russia.
The German channel ARD had broadcast from December 2014 a series of damning documentaries.
Ten months after the revelations of German television and the Stepanov couple, the Canadian Richard Pound published for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) a damning report on Russian athletics: these doping cases would not have "been able to exist" without the consent of the government.
Today, in a statement, WADA welcomes a victory "
landmark
."
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