Former Russia track president banned in doping cover-up case
MONACO: An elaborate deception involving a fake medical clinic in a demolished building and made-up claims about a world champion athlete’s car crash led to five senior Russian track and field officials being banned from the sport Wednesday.
Disciplinary rulings found former Russian track and field president Dmitry Shlyakhtin and his colleagues obstructed an anti-doping investigation into high jumper Danil Lysenko with forged documents and fake claims.
Shlyakhtin, who let the federation soon ater charges were filed in 2019, was banned for four years.
“It appears that most if not all of the senior management of RUSAF were involved in this major fraud. That is quite shocking,” the verdict in Shlyakhtin and board member Artur Karamyan’s case reads, using an abbreviation for the federation.
The panel added that it viewed the maximum four-year sanction allowed by the rules as “grossly inadequate”.
In 2018, Lysenko was one of Russia’s brightest young talents, granted coveted “neutral” status to compete at major international events despite RUSAF being suspended for earlier doping offenses. However, he faced a ban ater being charged with missing a drug test and twice failing to provide details of his whereabouts so he could be reached for no-notice testing.
Shlyakhtin and other officials helped Lysenko cook up an explanation that a bout of appendicitis had landed him in the nonexistent “SD Clinic” in Moscow and let him unable to upload the required information about his whereabouts, the Athletics Integrity Unit’s later investigation found.
Shlyakhtin urged Lysenko to undergo a batery of medical tests later, used to create realistic-looking fake records presented to investigators at the AIU. Lysenko and Karamyan drove together to view the address given for the “SD Clinic”, where a real clinic had once operated, but the building had been demolished, the investigation found.
Another RUSAF official, Elena Orlova, compiled documents stating Lysenko had been involved in a June 2018 car crash to support a claim he was too distracted to let anti-doping authorities know of his whereabouts by the deadline of June 30, the AIU found. Investigators concluded the accident actually happened more than two weeks ater the deadline had passed. In a 15-month investigation, the AIU spoted contradictions in the evidence from Russia, including a change in the location where Lysenko was supposedly treated, and then uncovered the deception, following a trail of e-mails and Whatsapp messages implicating the five officials.