During the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018, Russian athletes paraded under a neutral banner.

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Martin BUREAU / AFP

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, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS ).

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 the computer data of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, "are not as great as WADA wanted", admit the arbitrators in their decision.

To justify their leniency, they 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 international sport. clean ".

We are pleased to have won this landmark case. The CAS Panel has clearly upheld our findings that the Russian authorities brazenly and illegally manipulated the Moscow Laboratory data in an effort to cover up an institutionalized doping scheme.

https://t.co/FEw9ZChV43

- Witold Bańka (@WitoldBanka) December 17, 2020

Clearly, athletes were largely preserved from the collective sanction demanded by WADA and which initially included three editions of the Olympic Games, until Paris-2024, potentially ending the careers of many of them.

If the suspension applies until December 16, 2022, its effects on the FIFA 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 CAS press release does not specify how this tolerance can be applied to team sports.

In addition, the court ordered Rusada, the Russian anti-doping agency, to pay 1.27 million dollars (approximately one million euros) to WADA to reimburse the expertises carried out since January 2019 on the rigging of laboratory data. from Moscow.

The world anti-doping policeman had already committed nearly 4 million dollars (3.3 million euros) in 2015 and 2016 in two other investigations on institutionalized doping in Russia, and in particular on the cheating put in place during the 2014 Olympics in Sochi with the help of the Russian secret service.

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  • AMA

  • 2020 Olympics

  • Doping

  • Sport

  • Olympic Games

  • Russia