Russia Avoids IAAF Expulsion For Now

(ATR) The Russian Athletics Federation has done enough to avoid being expelled from the IAAF but Russian authorities still have work to do if RusAF is to be reinstated.

Rune Andersen, chair of the International Association of Athletics Federations taskforce working towards RusAF’s reinstatement, said on Friday that the threat of full expulsion made at the last IAAF Council meeting in March "had its desired effect".

"There has been a lot of meaningful engagement from RusAF since the last meeting and they have made significant progress meeting the outstanding requirements. In fact, in some cases they have gone above and beyond what is required," Andersen said at a news conference following the latest IAAF Council meeting in Buenos Aires.

But he made it clear that there is still work to be done for RusAF to once again be a member in good standing in the IAAF. There are three main requirements outstanding.

The first should cause no problems. RusAF has made a "written commitment" to pay all the costs incurred by the IAAF as a result of the Russian doping scandal, "including the cost of the task force and the cost of the various CAS cases".

The other two could be more problematic, since Russia has to this point refused to accept either.

Andersen says Russian authorities must acknowledge "the findings of the McLaren and Schmid commissions that officials from the Russian ministry of sport orchestrated the doping conspiracy and cover up described in the reports" and additionally must provide "access to the data from testing of samples at the Moscow lab from 2011 to 2015 so that the IAAF and other sports concerned can determine whether the suspicious findings reported in the Moscow lab’s LIMS database should or should not be pursued as adverse analytical findings."

These are the two main sticking points that have also kept the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) from being reinstated by WADA.

"The taskforce agreed with WADA, that these are very important requirements," Andersen says. "If the Russian authorities do not acknowledge that ministry of sport officials corrupted the operations of RUSADA and the Moscow lab, how can we have any comfort there won’t be any repeat in the future?

"And how can Russian athletes be readmitted to international competitions without undermining the integrity of those competitions unless all of the suspicious findings reported in the LIMS data have first been resolved?

"It would make a mockery of clean sport to reinstate RUsAF when the evidence required to resolve these suspicions one way or the other is still being withheld," he added.

Andersen says he is hopeful for a breakthrough in talks between WADA and Russian authorities and that the points are resolved before the WADA executive committee meeting in September.

If such a breakthrough happens before the next IAAF Council meeting in December, Andersen says the task force "would hope and expect to be able to recommend that RusAF be provisionally reinstated at that time".

Officially, the IAAF Council adopted a resolution in Buenos Aires that RusAF not be reinstated for the time being.

Written by Gerard Farek

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