MOSCOW: The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on Monday (Dec 9) banned Russia from global sporting events, including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, after accusing Moscow of falsifying data from an anti-doping laboratory.
WADA's executive committee took the decision after it concluded that Moscow had tampered with laboratory data by planting fake evidence and deleting files linked to positive doping tests that could have helped identify drug cheats.
"The full list of recommendations have been unanimously accepted," said WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald, speaking at a meeting of the body's executive committee in Lausanne.
Under the sanctions, Russian sportsmen and women will still be allowed to compete at the Olympics next year but only if they can demonstrate that they were not part of what WADA believes was a state-sponsored system of doping.
"They are going to have prove they had nothing to do with the non-compliance, (that) they were not involved in the doping schemes as described by the McLaren report, or they did not have their samples affected by the manipulation," Fitzgerald said.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the ban against the country was the result "anti-Russian hysteria" and should be appealed.
"This is the continuation of this anti-Russian hysteria that has already become chronic," Medvedev was quoted as saying by local news agencies.
Russia, which has tried to showcase itself as a global sports power, has been embroiled in doping scandals since a 2015 report commissioned by the WADA found evidence of mass doping in Russian athletics.
Its doping woes have grown since, with many of its athletes sidelined from the past two Olympics and the country stripped of its flag altogether at last year's Pyeongchang Winter Games as punishment for state-sponsored doping cover-ups at the 2014 Sochi Games.
Monday's sanctions had been recommended by WADA's compliance review committee in response to the doctored laboratory data provided by Moscow earlier this year.
One of the conditions for the reinstatement of Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA, which was suspended in 2015 in the wake of the athletics doping scandal but reinstated last year, had been that Moscow provide an authentic copy of the laboratory data.
The sanctions effectively strip the agency of its accreditation.
Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov last month attributed the discrepancies in the laboratory data to technical issues.
The punishment leaves the door open for clean Russian athletes to compete at major international sporting events without their flag or anthem for four years, as was the case during the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.
Some Russian officials, meanwhile, have branded the call for sanctions unfair and likened it to broader Western attempts to hold back the country.
If RUSADA appeals the sanctions endorsed by WADA's executive committee, the case will be referred to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), WADA has said.
"ATTACK ON SPORT"
The WADA decision was widely predicted, with the body's president, Craig Reedie, having made a presentation Saturday to the Olympic Summit, participants of which "strongly condemned those responsible for the manipulation of the data from the Moscow laboratory".
"It was agreed that this was an attack on sport and that these actions should lead to the toughest sanctions against those responsible," the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said in a statement.
"It was stressed by the participants that full justice must be finally done so that the guilty ones can be properly punished and the innocent ones are fully protected."
The IOC asked that the Russian authorities deliver the "fully authenticated raw data".
Former WADA president Dick Pound, who chaired the commission that in 2015 made damning accusations of mass doping in Russian athletics, said Moscow had this time gone "too far".
"The IOC is a little bit tired about what Russia has been doing and so I see the IOC probably focusing more on athletes who are newer," Pound told AFP.
Pound acknowledged the influential role of Russia - which in recent years hosted the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics as well as the football World Cup in 2018 - "on many levels" in the sporting world.
"On the field of play, it is a big, important country. With China and the United States, it's among the sporting giants, so that's influential," he said.
"It's (also) influential because Russia hosts and is willing to host many competitions for international federations, especially those who don't have much money of their own, so they have a considerable influence among the international federations.
"And they've been quite strategic about making sure that they get Russians into positions on international federations. So they have an impact from inside as well as from outside."
"A MOCKERY"
A majority of WADA's influential athlete committee had called overnight for a "complete ban on Russian participation", nine members of the 17-strong group saying such a move was "the only meaningful sanction".
"We maintain that the fraud, manipulation and deception revealed to date will only be encouraged and perpetuated with a lesser response," they said.
"To date, the Russian doping saga has dominated three Olympic and Paralympic Games, with a fourth on the horizon. Russia's ongoing and intentional acts of deception, fraud and corruption have made a mockery not only those who play by the rules, but those who create and safeguard them."
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