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Doping scandal in Russian sports

Russian sports authorities to answer WADA’s questions to RUSADA — Kremlin

The presidential press secretary pointed out that the issue was within the purview of the Russian sports authorities

Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov Mikhail Metzel/TASS

Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS

MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. Russian sports authorities are preparing answers to questions from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) addressed to the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

"We know that WADA has in fact questions to us and a deadline of three weeks was set to prepare answers to them," Peskov said. "We should just wait for these three weeks."

Read also

WADA initiates fast-track RUSADA non-compliance issue consideration

Peskov added that "the Kremlin is not interacting with WADA [on this issue] since this issue is in the competence of the Russian sports authorities and it is up to them to come up with the answers."

On Monday, WADA initiated a probe into the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency with the Code of the world’s governing anti-doping body. German ARD journalist Hajo Seppelt reported earlier that Russia was suspected of manipulations with the data from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, which was all reported by the WADA Compliance Committee to the WADA Executive Committee (ExCo), which held a session on September 23 in Tokyo.

"Ensuring the authenticity of the Moscow [laboratory data] was one of the critical conditions imposed by the ExCo for RUSADA to maintain its compliance," AFP news agency quoted a statement released after the WADA Executive Committee’s meeting in Tokyo.

WADA’s work at Moscow Anti-Doping Lab

Specialists from WADA were granted access to the database of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory in January this year and copied 24 terabytes of information on Russian athletes’ doping samples collected between 2012 and 2015. WADA experts finished their work to retrieve doping samples from the Moscow Lab on April 30 having collected 2,262 doping samples in 4,524 containers (Samples A and B).

The WADA Executive Committee reinstated the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) on September 20, 2018 on condition that WADA experts would be granted access before December 31, 2018 to doping samples at the Moscow Anti-Doping Lab, which was sealed off in connection with a federal investigation.

RUSADA Director General Yury Ganus told TASS on August 11 that the data regarding the reanalyzed doping samples from the Moscow laboratory had already been shared with international sports federations, which would start handing down verdicts after their internal investigations.

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Doping scandal in Russian sports

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