Russia Faces New Four-Year Olympic Ban Over Doping Scandal

(Bloomberg) -- Russia faces an almost total ban from international sports events for four years amid a renewed doping crisis after officials in Moscow were accused of fabricating evidence to cover up the use of banned substances by the country’s athletes.

If accepted by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee meeting in Paris on Dec. 9, the sweeping punishment would keep Russia out of the Summer and Winter Olympics, ban the national soccer team from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and may prevent the nation hosting matches in the UEFA Euro 2020 soccer championships.

The Montreal-based body’s compliance review committee demanded “strong consequences” in a report published late Monday, after WADA found anomalies in drug test results recovered from a Moscow laboratory in January as part of an agreement to lift a previous three-year ban in September 2018.

The penalties threaten humiliation for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who personally oversaw the spending of tens of billions of dollars to host the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2018 soccer World Cup as part of his efforts to restore Russia’s Soviet-era image as a sporting superpower. After placing first in the medals table at Sochi, Russia has since been stripped of 13 of its 33 medals as the scale of its state-backed doping program at the games emerged.

Russian track and field athletes were subsequently barred from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. At the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Russian athletes were only allowed to compete under the Olympic flag.

Strict Conditions

The new sanctions would ban Russia from competing at major sporting events and impose strict conditions for the participation of any Russian athletes, who would only be able to take part under a neutral flag. No Russian government officials or representatives would be allowed to attend the events. Russia would also be barred from bidding to host any major championships during the four-year period, extending to include the 2032 Summer Olympics.

If WADA adopts a ban on Dec. 9, it would be enforced by the governing bodies in all sports that are signatories to its anti-doping code. Russia will have the right to appeal to the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The Kremlin denies the doping allegations. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hit back on Tuesday at the threatened ban. “There are those who want to put Russia in a defensive situation, accused of everything in every sphere of international life,” he told reporters in Moscow.

But the InternationaL Olympic Committee called for “the toughest sanctions” against Russia. “This flagrant manipulation is an attack on the credibility of sport itself and is an insult to the sporting movement worldwide,” the Lausanne-based body said on its website.

Broken Ranks

There’s only “minimal hope” WADA will decide against a ban, said Vyacheslav Fetisov, a member of parliament for the ruling United Russia party who’s played hockey with Putin regularly for years, the state-run Tass news service reported. “We are the most discredited country in the history of world sport and, apparently, the global sports community is disposed to be radical,” he said.

Russia’s anti-doping chief, Yuriy Ganus, who was appointed in 2017, has broken ranks with his own country, saying that thousands of test results handed over to WADA were tampered with. He has accused unidentified influential former athletes of being behind the deception. Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov has denied any wrongdoing by Russia, insisting earlier this month that WADA had not found any “manipulation” of the doping tests.

An independent investigation commissioned by WADA found in 2016 that Russian sports officials oversaw a vast program to manipulate doping test results from 2011 to 2015, and that athletes’ positive urine samples were swapped out during the Sochi Olympics.

To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin

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