MOSCOW, March 18. /TASS/. The next regular meeting between Dmitry Shlyakhtin, the president of the All-Russia Athletics Federation (RusAF), and Rune Andersen, the head of the IAAF Independent Taskforce Group, is scheduled to be held in Norway’s Oslo on March 27, RusAF spokeswoman Natalia Yukhareva told TASS on Monday.
Yukhareva said that Jonathan Taylor, a legal counsel to the IAAF Taskforce Group, was expected to be in attendance as well during the talks next week between Shlyakhtin and Andersen.
"The meeting is scheduled to focus on two issues, which are the signing of a legal document necessary for RusAF’s debt repayment to the IAAF and the situation concerning accusations against RusAF in a documentary of [German public broadcaster] ARD regarding Valentin Maslakov," Yukhareva said.
Germany’s ARD television channel aired earlier in the year a documentary alleging that former Head Coach of the Russian national track and field athletics team continued working with athletes despite a doping scandal, which erupted in the middle of 2015.
The IAAF never filed official charges against Maslakov, but on March 11 Rune Andersen announced to journalists that the IAAF requested the RusAF to come up with a detailed report on this issue.
The IAAF Council decided at its session on December 4 in Monaco to extend the membership suspension of the RusAF citing a number of criteria, which were still needed to be implemented by the Russian side, including the repayment of the $2.76 million debt.
On March 5, the IAAF sent a letter to RusAF, stating that the Russian track and field athletics body needed to add up $460,000 in its debt repayment for other incurred expenses, putting the overall sum at over $3.22 million.
The world’s governing body of track and field athletics suspended RusAF’s membership in late 2015 following a wave of anti-doping rules violations and put forward a host of criteria, which the Russian ruling body of track and field sports was obliged to implement in order to restore its membership in the global federation.
The IAAF, however, permitted clean athletes from Russia to participate in the international tournaments under the neutral status or the Authorized Neutral Athlete (ANA) until the membership of the RusAF was reinstated. IAAF’s previously issued neutral-status permissions for Russian athletes expired on December 31, 2018.
The IAAF Doping Review Board approved on December 18, 2018 an updated version of the Guidance Note for Authorized Neutral Athlete (ANA) status applications and sent the document to the RusAF.
Yukhareva told TASS last week that over 225 applications from national athletes requesting ANA status had been sent to the IAAF for approval since December 19, 2018.
According to statistics provided by the IAAF in December, the world’s athletics body received in 2018 more than 200 applications from Russian athletes. A total of 73 Russian athletes were declared eligible to compete as authorized neutral athletes in 2018. Sixty eight applications were denied and six athletes had their ANA status revoked. A number of further applications have been withdrawn or were submitted out of time.