Russian antidoping body set for reprieve?

MOSCOW: With the clock ticking towards new sanctions, Russian authorities said yesterday they would allow a World AntiDoping Agency inspection team to return to a Moscow laboratory to retrieve data it had earlier been denied.

Russia’s minister of sport, Pavel Kolobkov, said Wada officials would return to Moscow tomorrow. Wada also confirmed in a press release that a threeperson team would be allowed entry to the tainted Moscow laboratory and access to data it was prevented from securing during a visit in December.

Access to the lab and data before a December 31 deadline was a condition of Wada’s September decision to reinstate the Russian AntiDoping Agency (Rusada).

However, extraction of data stored in the facility’s Laboratory Information Management System (Lims), was not completed due to a technicality, leaving Rusada again at risk of being found noncompliant.

Russian authorities had said the inspection team’s equipment was not certified under Russian law.

The decision to allow the new inspection team access comes as Wada is preparing to impose possible new sanctions on Rusada.

Rusada was suspended in 2015 after a Wadacommissioned report outlined evidence of statebacked, systematic doping in Russian athletics, allegations Moscow has denied.

A Wada Compliance Review Committee (CRC) is scheduled to meet at the agency’s

Montreal headquarters on January 1415, where they were expected to hear from the original fivemember inspection team.

The CRC is then due to submit a report to the Wada executive committee and could recommend that Rusada once again be ruled noncompliant and face new sanctions.

Russian authorities must also ensure that any reanalysis of samples required by Wada, following review of the laboratory data, is completed by no later than June 30, 2019. — Reuters