Russia said on a Friday in late December 2019 that it would fight its four-year Olympic ban, and the fight will be settled at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Tokyo will be the third Games in a row to open under the shadow of a legal battle over Russian doping.
The Russian anti-doping agency, RUSADA, said it “disputes the (WADA) notice in its entirety,” evidence of data tampering included. That data archive came from the Moscow lab in January 2019, handed over in exchange for the lifting of earlier sanctions in 2018. It was meant to clear up past coverups. It has produced more lawsuits instead.
WADA investigators found that someone had been intensively editing the files in the weeks before the handover, scrubbing out traces of failed drug tests. They also said fake messages had been spliced into chat logs, apparently to smear Grigory Rodchenkov, the former lab director. Rodchenkov left Russia and is now a key witness for WADA. He went public with claims of a vast state-sponsored doping scheme after the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, where Russia topped the medal table.
A boss overruled
The appeal did not have everyone’s backing, even inside RUSADA. CEO Yuri Ganus, a critic of Russian officials, disagreed with the decision and attached his own note of protest to Friday’s letter. The agency’s founders, who include some of the country’s most influential sports leaders, overruled him.
Ganus thinks the appeal has little chance and could backfire with harsher sanctions, including a ban on all Russian athletes. Under the current ban they can compete as neutrals. He also believes the editing took place. A public hearing, he said, carries risks: “First of all, it is a public hearing, which will reveal to the whole world the supporting information of the official position of sports authorities on changes in the computer database.”
President Vladimir Putin had already called the ban “unfair,” so the appeal surprised nobody.
What the ban covers
The sanctions bar the Russian team name, flag and anthem from a range of major events over the next four years, among them next year’s Olympics and the 2022 soccer World Cup. Russians can still enter as unaffiliated athletes if they pass a vetting process that looks at their drug-testing history and any role in lab coverups.
Some Western athletes and groups, the United States Anti-Doping Agency among them, wanted a blanket ban and were angry about that.
On hosting, Putin said the four-year bar would have little effect and named the 2022 men’s volleyball world championships as an event Russia means to keep. WADA wants events moved unless that is “legally or practically impossible,” a wording that could give organizers with financial commitments a loophole. Next year’s European Championship matches in St. Petersburg and the 2021 Champions League final are exempt anyway, since they are continental rather than world events.
Once a panel of three CAS arbitrators is chosen, a verdict is due within three months.
