On July 23, the XXXII Summer Olympic Games will start in Tokyo. Over 11 thousand athletes from 205 countries and a separate refugee team will compete for 339 sets of awards in 33 sports. The list of official participants will not include the Russian national team. Formally, the team of the Russian Olympic Committee will perform in Japan instead of it, in which the tricolor will be replaced by a neutral flag with the organization's logo, and the national anthem - to the music of Tchaikovsky's First Concert.
This situation, when Russian athletes must compete in neutral status and cannot officially represent their home country, is associated with the removal of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA). The national anti-doping regulator was again stripped of its World Anti-Doping Code compliance status in 2019 after failing to comply with recovery conditions.
RUSADA continues to carry out its usual anti-doping activities in Russia, while continuing to work to restore compliance status, which should help restore the right to Russian athletes to fly their flag.
Less than a year ago, the agency changed its management, and Mikhail Bukhanov, who previously worked as a legal consultant at the agency, became the acting general director instead of Yuri Ganus.
RT decided to figure out what one of the most important organizations in Russian sports is now, what tasks it performs and what problems it overcomes on its way.
History and mission
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency was founded in 2008.
Its appearance is associated with the adoption by the UN of the Convention against Doping in Sport, which was ratified by the Russian Federation in December 2006.
RUSADA is a non-profit organization in the form of an association funded by the state.
In Russia, RUSADA is an independent body and reports exclusively to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which monitors the implementation of the World Anti-Doping Code and determines the standards for the fight against prohibited drugs.
Almost all professional sports on the planet live on them.
Failure to comply with these standards leads to the fact that a certain country and the anti-doping agency operating on its territory are deprived of compliance status, as happened with Russia. Therefore, according to Bukhanov, the main thing for RUSADA is not just the fight against violations of the rules, but its conduct in accordance with those norms that have been developed by the international community.
“Our general goal is to be the executors of the World Anti-Doping Code, implementing all the tendencies of the global anti-doping movement in the country. RUSADA is now called upon to be the most authentic conduit of this movement. Anti-doping is a recognized necessity of international sport, expressed in the documents of the world regulation. It is these documents that must be strictly observed if we want to break the endless circle of the doping crisis in the country, ”said Bukhanov RT.
According to him, sport is a juxtaposition of the unique physical abilities of people. And any comparison must be carried out on the same grounds - otherwise, there is scope for deception and fraud. This is precisely what doping is in its essence. Fighting against it allows you to break the vicious chain of success in the competition of those who are able to financially secure victory for themselves thanks to the illegal successes of medical science, Bukhanov is sure.
“Anti-doping opens up opportunities for the truly talented and unique from birth.
There are tens of thousands of them in a huge country.
RUSADA is focused on ensuring equal rights and opportunities.
In the charter of RUSADA, the general goal is detailed and becomes more specific in the form of relevant provisions.
Among them: the prevention of doping in sports, the fight and eradication of doping at the national level, the development of national anti-doping rules, ”said the head of the organization.
Control
RUSADA has two main areas of activity. Sports fans regularly learn about the results of the first of them from news reports - testing athletes, taking doping samples, investigating anti-doping rule violations and making decisions on them. RUSADA is not a monopoly in these areas. International sports federations and competition organizers can also test athletes, and national organizations like the All-Russian Athletics Federation can try and disqualify cases.
At the same time, RUSADA does not directly check the samples.
This can only be done by WADA-accredited laboratories, which are not currently available in Russia.
There is a Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, but after the well-known scandals around its former director Grigory Rodchenkov, it no longer works as before.
It is connected with the anti-doping sphere only with the storage of old samples.
It is not mandatory for every country to have its own anti-doping laboratory.
There are only 30 WADA-accredited scientific centers in the world that check doping tests on behalf of the agency.
RUSADA mainly sends samples to European laboratories - in the Belgian Ghent and the Austrian Seibersdorf - using a courier service.
The task of the agency is to send samples on time and work with ready-made results.
RUSADA's work is intensifying before the main competition - the Olympic Games.
Their potential participants need additional testing to be able to confidently say that the team will compete fairly.
According to Maria Rozina, Responsible Anti-Doping Specialist of the Russian Speed Skating Union, during such periods RUSADA is fully focused on its main task.
“We have a working relationship with RUSADA.
We are constantly in touch with employees of all departments, they advise us at any time of the day, even after working hours they answer our urgent questions.
We have a very close contact.
The closer the next Olympics, the more carefully we work with athletes, remind of something, teach.
The work is getting richer, ”Rozina told RT.
Education
The second block of RUSADA's activities is educational. Just as knowledge and compliance with the rules of the road helps avoid accidents on the roads, so education about doping should stop doping in the bud. For those who want to be involved in sports, it is also vital to know their rights and responsibilities and understand the complex anti-doping rules.
Assistance in this direction is the direct responsibility of RUSADA.
It develops and implements anti-doping education programs for a wide variety of target audiences.
Even within the title subject - the athletes themselves - there are many different groups that require a special approach to themselves.
According to Kirill Volobuev, the chief specialist of the educational department of RUSADA, pupils of children's sports schools need one set of knowledge, while the athletes of the national team need a different one.
“It makes sense for young athletes to first of all talk about the values of sport, while the subtleties and peculiarities of anti-doping legislation are already necessary for more adults.
We try to speak with everyone in the same language, but at the same time we make an amendment for the target audience, we provide the information that is needed at this stage of sports training, "Volobuev said.
Differentiating educational programs is also necessary for trainers and support staff. Separately, RUSADA carries out work with those responsible for anti-doping support in regional executive authorities and all-Russian sports federations, including consultations on the creation of anti-doping units within them. The results of their work are subsequently assessed using ratings.
“We regularly analyze certain needs of sports subjects. For example, recently we have implemented a very large program in the Northwestern Federal District, together with the RFU we have done work for regional federations. We trained those responsible for the fight against doping on the ground, told them about the legislation, talked about how they should work, showed international and Russian documents. They chewed up all the key points of anti-doping activities in great detail, ”Volobuev noted.
He admits that he still has to meet with misunderstanding on the part of regional federations and coaches, who have much more influence on athletes than the educational specialists of RUSADA. However, such cases are already becoming an exception, and it is becoming easier to find a common language. The agency emphasizes that it is not only a punitive body, but helps in the first place not to break the rules.
“We are seeing quite good results in terms of feedback.
An athlete can come up and say: “This I didn’t know before, I had violations on the“ flags ”, but now I understood and realized it, it will not happen again”.
Some athletes still do not know that during doping control they must not leave the field of view of the inspector.
We convey this, and then they understand how everything works.
It happens that not from the first, but from the tenth time we succeed in changing the mood, ”Volobuev said.
In the field of education, RUSADA should try to make sure that doping is perceived by people as an extremely negative phenomenon, Bukhanov said.
And to help with this should be adherence to international standards to which the agency continues to strive.
“Any social phenomenon is multifactorial.
Doping, being a deviation, is complex in its composition.
It is necessary to rebuild the public consciousness of the professional masses, to build sports management in the context of making doping unprofitable, we condemn.
In other words, there should be a set of measures, where the initial measure is the widespread implementation of international anti-doping regulation.
It is this kind of regulation that is the ethics of the new time in sports and there is no other reality, except for following the unified requirements, ”Bukhanov said.
Financing
RUSADA receives most of its funding from the state.
In the past, the source was the Ministry of Sports, but now the agency receives money directly from the Ministry of Finance - such a scheme avoids possible influence from sports entities.
Government funding is the norm in the anti-doping industry, as all of the world's national agencies are sponsored by their governments.
The only difference is how much of the budget comes from the treasury and how much from own revenues.
According to Bukhanov, the current volume of funding is now insufficient to achieve the planned test results.
RUSADA's budget is 501 million and has been gradually decreasing in recent years.
“RUSADA receives funding through the Ministry of Finance in accordance with the subsidy agreement.
In May last year, the volume was reduced by 10%, then by another 1%.
Undoubtedly, the reduction in funding leads to a reduction in the testing program in terms of volume, "- said the head of RUSADA.
The agency may carry out commercial activities and enter into testing agreements with national federations.
For example, it cooperates with the Russian Ice Hockey Federation.
As a rule, playing sports do not raise serious suspicions on the part of supervisory authorities, but if an organization wants to have an impeccable reputation in terms of doping, then it can order additional testing from RUSADA.
It may also be needed in those sports where a certain number of samples is a condition for participation in the competition.
Status
At the moment RUSADA has been deprived of the status of compliance with the WADA Code for the second time due to the revealed facts of manipulations with the Moscow laboratory database.
However, this situation does not prevent the agency from continuing to carry out its operational activities on the territory of Russia and to continue working for the benefit of pure sports in the country - this right has been reserved for it.
To fully restore the status of RUSADA, it is required to pay all the fines assigned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in its decision of December 17, 2020, as well as follow the WADA plan, which was provided to the Russian side in June 2021.
RUSADA is expected to show openness, honesty and independence in its work.
WADA will monitor its activities through monitoring, which includes monthly and quarterly reports.
The current situation with RUSADA differs from the one it got into after the first deprivation of status, in that there is a certain credit of trust in the agency, both from WADA and sports federations in Russia.
According to Rozina, the latest decision of CAS did not affect the cooperation of the TFR with RUSADA.
“Even after the decision of the CAS, RUSADA retained all of its duties, it is just that WADA stricter controls the performance of these duties.
This did not affect us, the federation, at all.
Everything goes in working order.
We trust RUSADA, especially since people have changed there several times.
It can be seen that now they have a completely different attitude to work, ”said Rozina.