Russia’s anti-doping chief is predicting a lengthy Olympic ban for the national squad, lashing out at Moscow authorities who he said handed over falsified lab data to international investigators.
The accusations are the latest scandal to hit Russian sport after the country was banned from competing in several international competitions over state-sponsored doping.
“Russia’s Olympic squad will be prevented from participating fully in the Olympic Games in Tokyo [next year]... I think that this will also happen at the [Winter] Games in China [in 2022],” Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) director-general Yuri Ganus said in an exclusive interview.
The best-case scenario in his view is very limited participation “by certain athletes, by invitation,” as happened at last year’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
He said that he expected other penalties too, including restrictions on holding international tournaments in Russia, exclusion of Russians from international sports federations and fines.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last month demanded that Russia explain “inconsistencies” in electronic data it handed over, which listed results of tests carried out under the laboratory’s previous leadership.
The data handover was supposed to demonstrate Russia’s desire for transparency after the scandalous revelations that RUSADA facilitated state-sponsored doping between 2011 and 2015.
Russian Minister of Sport Pavel Kolobkov on Oct. 8 sent a letter of explanation to WADA about the data.
However, Ganus — who said that he has not had access to that letter — suggested that the scale of the data manipulation is such that these explanations are likely to be insufficient.
WADA’s Compliance Review Committee, which has powers to recommend sanctions, was yesterday scheduled to meet experts who have analyzed the data and looked at Russia’s explanations.
The walls of Ganus’ office in central Moscow are covered with posters promoting clean sport and messages of support from counterparts around the world.
He insisted that RUSADA had nothing to do with the data manipulation, because it did not have access to the database in question.
He said he believes that high-ranking officials must have carried out the fraud, as the data was “under the control of Russia’s Investigative Committee.”
The powerful agency is leading criminal investigations into laboratory employees who were allegedly involved in state-sponsored doping.
However, Ganus questioned what those investigations could hope to achieve now that the credibility of authorities has been so undermined in his eyes.
He hinted that officials might have intervened to protect top athletes from the revelation of their use of doping.
“Whose names were in there? What was there in the data? This data was information about athletes’ test samples,” Ganus said.
“Who were the people who were able to infiltrate the Investigative Committee, what state powers did they have? This is extremely serious,” he said.
The falsifications took place “on the eve of the transfer [of the data] to WADA,” he added.
Ganus, whose appointment as head of RUSADA in 2017 was supposed to drag Russia out of a morass, now sees the country at a crossroads.
“This is a blow to the current generation of athletes and to future generations as well,” Ganus said. “It’s a tragedy.”
In the past few months, Ganus has issued harsh criticisms of Russia’s sporting authorities, accusing Russian media of attempting to discredit him and inventing a Western conspiracy against Moscow.
“All my statements are aimed at us making the right decisions,” Ganus said. “Russia cannot continue any more with its old methods which have made the doping crisis worse.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier