Russian athletes will be allowed to participate in events as non-participants as long as WADA does not prove any connection with the whipping scheme which, at the highest level, involved representatives from Russia’s state security apparatus replacing clean-tainted dope test samples during mid-day nighttime activity at the 2014 Winter Olympics. great to project the sporting and economic power of the country.
The scheme, which had begun years earlier, came to light just after one of its chief architects, Grigory Rodchenkov, who was head of a doping laboratory in Moscow which was at the heart of the scandal, show happen.
Rodchenkov, who now lives in an undisclosed location in the United States, revealed how hundreds of thin antidoping products were treated before entering official records, protecting athletes from recognizing them and allowing them to reap chemically enhanced benefits before moving on to major competition events.
Antidoping investigators recommended a ban four years after they discovered that Russian officials had taken evidence and manipulated the contents of a drug test database in an attempt to discredit Rodchenkov and further discredit his behavior. . The WADA board, at a meeting in December last year, agreed with the proposal and suspended it.
Until the global control of WADA was lifted, sanctions against sports and Russian officials had been from time to time, and largely left to the governing bodies of individual sports. The world athletics, a track and field regulatory body, has taken the hardest line in a long time, with a ban that has kept Russia in the wilderness of sport for nearly five years.
The International Olympic Committee, on the other hand, has been willing to work more broadly, with its president Thomas Bach reiterating its opposition to a common penalty on energy- Russian actors. That caused the strange scene when Russia entered one of its biggest teams at the 2018 Winter Olympics, where the IOC’s penalty was largely limited to Russian symbols, taking its toll. -into uniform, team name and hymn.