Despite protests, Russia’s antidoping agency reinstated
The World Anti-Doping Agency declared Russia’s scandal-ridden operation back in business Thursday.
The decision is designed to bring a close to one of sports’ most notorious doping scandals but one bitterly disputed by hundreds of athletes and described as “treachery” by the lawyer for the man who exposed the corruption.
On a 9-2 vote, the executive committee took the advice of the agency’s compliance review panel and declared RUSADA as having satisfied conditions of reinstatement that were gradually softened over the summer.
The agency had been found completely flawed, deceptive and actually in collusion with athletes trying to escape detection of using performance enhancing drugs, instead of performing its function of catching users.
In most tangible ways, the decision doesn’t change much: RUSADA has been up and running for a while, bringing one of the world’s largest testing programs back on line with the help of officials from Britain and elsewhere. And Russia’s Olympic committee was brought back into the fold after the Pyeongchang Olympics, where athletes who could prove they were clean were able to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”
But RUSADA’s reinstatement as an agency that monitors its athletes for illegal drug use, now clears the country to again bid for major international events — although soccer’s World Cup was held there this summer despite that restriction.
It also clears a major hurdle for Russia’s track team to be declared compliant by that sport’s international governing body, one of the few to take a strong, consistent stand against doping.
Perhaps most importantly, hundreds of athletes and dozens of world antidoping leaders see it as a stinging rebuke to the ideal of fair play.
“WADA’s decision to reinstate Russia represents the greatest treachery against clean athletes in Olympic history,” said Jim Walden, the attorney for Grigory Rodchenkov, the former Moscow lab director who exposed much of the Russian scheme.
WADA had been telegraphing the move since Sept. 14, when it released the recommendation of its compliance review committee. Canadian Beckie Scott, a highly respected Olympic gold medal cross-country skier, resigned from that committee afterward. “I’m profoundly disappointed,” Scott said to Canadian broadcaster CBC after the decision. “I feel this was an opportunity for WADA, and they have dealt a devastating blow to clean sport. I’m quite dismayed.”
Even in Russia, where the news was welcomed, it came with a sense that there’s still work to be done.
“These questions will always follow us,” said RUSADA CEO Yuri Ganus, whose appointment to the job was part of the housecleaning at the agency that WADA demanded. “These aren’t the kind of skeletons which can lie unnoticed in the closet. These are the skeletons which will be banging on the closet door all the time.”
The two biggest roadblocks to RUSADA’s reinstatement involved the country accepting findings from a report by investigator Richard McLaren.
Correspondence between WADA leaders and Russia’s sports minister suggest how to bridge the gap and a pattern emerged of WADA backing down.
“We think that a small addition to the letter, if acceptable to you, could ensure that the letter is well received ... and that a positive recommendation is provided,” WADA CEO Olivier Niggli wrote to sports minister Pavel Kolobkov.