MOSCOW, September 24. /TASS/. Russian athlete Maria Lasitskene, the world and European champion in high jump, said on Tuesday she would leave Russia to train abroad in case the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) was stripped of its compliance status again.
WADA announced on Monday that it had initiated a probe into the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) with the Code of the world’s governing anti-doping body based on the reported inconsistencies, discovered in the data from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory. WADA also informed the Russian side that it had a three-week time to provide explanations on the issue.
"I have been repeatedly stating in the recent time that we have no certainty regarding our participation in the Olympics in Tokyo and it is not about my emotions or that I do not know anything, as somebody tries to describe it this way," Lasitskene wrote in her Instagram account.
"We know enough to think this way, but we are ready for any possible outcome," she continued. "In case RUSADA is suspended again, we will leave beyond the Russian borders to hold training sessions abroad in order to be available for international doping officers."
The Russian athlete also said that in case she was banned from taking part in the 2020 Summer Olympics, she would turn to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland’s Lausanne.
"We are not the same as we were before the [2016] Olympics in Rio and we will now stand until the end defending our right to participate in the Olympic Games," Lasitskene, who won the 2019 European Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow in March, stated. "We will not be filing collective lawsuits anymore."
"If the need should arise to go to the CAS, I will go there and will fight for myself personally," the athlete said. "I am not going to skip the second Olympic Games in a row due to some particular people, who are unable to honestly fulfill their work obligations."
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced on Monday that it ruled to keep in force the membership suspension of the All-Russia Athletics Federation (RusAF).
Rune Andersen, the head of the IAAF Taskforce Group, said that the IAAF’s decision was influenced by a statement from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) regarding suspected inconsistencies in the data retrieved from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory.
The IAAF suspended RusAF’s membership in November 2015, following a wave of anti-doping rules violations and formed a special mission on the issue. The IAAF Taskforce Group, led by Norwegian expert Rune Andersen, was set up to oversee Russia’s implementation of requirements for RusAF’s membership reinstatement with the IAAF.
However, the IAAF 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. The ANA status prohibits Russian athletes from participating under the national flag.
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.
The RusAF started accepting neutral status applications from national track and field athletes on December 19, 2018. The world’s governing athletics body has already granted neutral-status participation permits to 128 Russian track and field athletes.
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 gathered 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.