The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has given Russia a tight two-month stay of execution to get its anti-doping house in order, but Moscow said it is confident Russian athletes will compete in the Rio Olympics.
Russia was suspended in November last year after revelations of state-sponsored doping and widespread corruption, with the IAAF setting up an independent taskforce to monitor the athletics powerhouse’s compliance to the verification criteria for re-entry to international competition.
Taskforce president Rune Andersen, a former World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) director, recommended to the IAAF Council that while Russia had made some advances, they simply were not enough for the moment.
Photo: AP
“The view of the taskforce is that there is significant work still to be done to satisfy the reinstatement conditions and so the All-Russian Athletic Federation should not be reinstated to membership at this stage,” IAAF president Sebastian Coe said.
Time is now ticking fast for Russian athletes ahead of the Olympic Games, not least because they have to attain Olympic-standard qualifying marks before teams are registered in the second week of July, with track and field set to begin on August 12 in Rio de Janeiro.
However, the door was left ajar for Russia’s re-inclusion in the IAAF family, with Coe saying that an extraordinary IAAF Council meeting would be held in May, with Andersen and his team again reporting their findings before a collective decision is taken.
Despite Andersen saying Russia’s problem was one of a cultural change that, worryingly, could take years, one person in no doubt that Russia would tick all the boxes in the coming two months is Russian Minister of Sports Vitaly Mutko.
“I do not see any insurmountable obstacles that may prevent the closing of the issue in May,” Mutko said.
Mutko said Russia is doing everything possible to meet the strict criteria set by the world athletics ruling body, but added that he believed the responsibility for doping code violation should be personal.
“When we speak about doping, there are no guarantees possible,” Mutko said. “It is all individual, that is why we are talking that there should be personal responsibility for doping use.”
Coe, who has endured a tough time since taking over the IAAF from now-disgraced former IAAF president Lamine Diack last year, repeated his vows to crack down on doping on Friday.
“My job is not actually to get as many athletes to the Olympic Games as possible,” the British two-time Olympic gold medalist said. “The job of the IAAF Council is to make sure that those athletes who are going to the Olympics are clean and are in systems that are based upon integrity.”
The IAAF Council’s decision to suspend Russia was widely expected, coming just two days after influential anti-doping czar Dick Pound compared Russian efforts to combat doping in athletics with changing deckchairs on the Titanic.
Russia aside, the IAAF Council also fired out a warning to five other nations, including east Africa track giants Ethiopia and Kenya, saying they are in “critical care” over their anti-doping programs.
“The reform process has led to more information being shared and … to this end, our review by anti-doping teams has identified five countries who the IAAF Council have agreed are in critical care at different degrees,” Coe said.
Coe said Ethiopia and Morocco had to “implement, as a matter of urgency, a robust and adequate national testing program, both in and out of competition.”
Kenya, Ukraine and Belarus were also “put on an IAAF monitoring list for 2016 to ensure their national anti-doping programs are significantly strengthened and their journey to compliance completed before the end of this year,” Coe added.
“There are no immediate sanctions — it is just a wake-up call at this point. Serious sanctions, also provided for within IAAF rules, will only be considered if they do not comply with Council requirements,” he said.
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