WADA’s Compliance Committee recommended on Monday that Russia be suspended for another four years, meaning the national team will be unable to participate in the upcoming Tokyo Olympics.
Last week the Compliance Review Committee recommended WADA’s Executive Committee to send RUSADA a notice of non-compliance with a critical requirement of the International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories, the recommendation risking to rob Russian athletes of their chance to participate in international competitions, including next year's Tokyo Olympics and the Beijing 2022 Olympics.
In 2015, RUSADA was banned by WADA over accusations of a large-scale state-sponsored doping scheme involving thousands of Russian athletes, coaches and officials, which Russia has denied. As a result, Russian athletes competed under the Olympic flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea's Pyeongchang. Last September, the ban was lifted, and RUSADA was recognized as compliant under the key condition that Moscow would provide the agency with access to a massive database of athlete records.
In September 2019, WADA launched another non-compliance procedure against Russia and gave the RUSADA three weeks to explain "inconsistencies" that the anti-doping watchdog found in probes received from the Moscow anti-doping laboratories earlier this year. After receiving the data from Moscow, WADA's investigation and intelligence department suspected that the records had been manipulated before being submitted.
