Yelena joins anti-doping board
Former Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva was confirmed on Tuesday as a member of the supervisory board of Russia’s anti-doping agency RUSASA, the Russian Olympic Committee said.
The 34-year-old Yelena, who retired after Russia’s track and field team were banned from competing at last year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, was selected in December to join RUSADA.
“The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) has nominated Yelena as a member of the RUSADA supervisory board,” the head of the ROC legal department, Alexandra Brilliantova, told TASS news agency.
Yelena, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, is also an International Olympic committee member. But her election to that body was contentious, with a third of the committee members who cast ballots voting against her.
She was an outspoken critic of a decision in November 2015 by the International Association of Athletics Federations to ban Russian track and field athletes from international competition. That kept the athletes from competing in the 2016 Olympics .
The IAAF decision came after the World Anti-Doping Agency commission said Russia had systematically broken anti-doping rules. WADA subsequently revoked the status of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory and stated that RUSADA did not comply with WADA standards. Since then, several more reports commissioned by WADA have found more than 1,000 athletes implicated in the statebacked doping scandal.
Yelena, among 67 Russian track and field athletes ruled out of the Rio Olympics last , has questioned the validity of the evidence against Russian athletes and has attacked Russian whistle-blowers.
Yelena herself has never been found to use performance-enhancing drugs.