MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th December, 2019) The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is likely to uphold the decision of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to curtail Russia's participation in international sports for four years, Jonathan Taylor, the chair of WADA's Compliance Review Committee (CRC), said on Monday.
It was the CRC that proposed to the WADA Executive Committee to ban Russia from hosting and participating in major international sporting events for four years due to alleged manipulation of data that Moscow provided to WADA investigators. On Monday, the Executive Committee unanimously endorsed the recommended sanctions. Russia now has 21 days to appeal the decision at CAS.
"Do I expect the decision of CAS to be different from the decision of the WADA Executive Committee today? No I don't," Taylor was quoted as saying by the InsideTheGames sports news outlet.
He opined that even if the CAS proceedings take time and postpone sanctions against Russia, Moscow will be sure to miss at least one of the forthcoming two Olympic Games - in Tokyo in 2020 or in Paris in 2024.
"It will be up to the Russians to decide which they want to have covered - Tokyo or Paris," he added.
If the ban remains in place during the Olympic and Paralympic games, only "clean" Russian athletes will be allowed to compete and only in neutral status, meaning that there will be no official team from Russia.
Russia's athletics federation had been suspended for mass doping since November 2015. It was temporarily reinstated in September 2018 on the condition that it discloses all data from its Moscow laboratory.
In September 2019, WADA launched another non-compliance procedure against Russia and gave the Russian Anti-Doping agency three weeks to explain "inconsistencies" that the anti-doping watchdog found in probes received from the Moscow laboratories.
