MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. The Supervisory Board of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) has recommended the agency’s Board of Founders to disagree with sanctions of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) against Russian sports and to turn this case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland’s Lausanne, RUSADA told TASS on Thursday.
The decision on the recommendations was made on Thursday at the Supervisory Board’s session in Moscow.
"The quorum was present and, in line with the RUSADA Charter, the Supervisory Board has the right to issue recommendations to the RUSADA General Assembly," Alexander Ivlev, the head of the RUSADA Supervisory Board, said.
"As part of the debates on WADA’s decision as of December 9 we have decided to challenge that decision [of WADA]," he added.
On December 9, the WADA Executive Committee (ExCo) approved the recommendations of its Compliance Review Committee (CRC) to revoke the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) and to strip Russia of the right to participate in major international sports tournaments, including the Olympics, Paralympics and world championships, for a period of four years.
The WADA ExCo also ruled that Russia must not host, or bid for hosting any major international sports tournament in this four-year period. Russian state officials, as well as the staff of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC), were banned from attending all major international sports tournaments for the four-year period.
On November 25, the WADA Compliance Review Committee (CRC) reiterated its previous recommendation for the world anti-doping body’s Executive Committee to strip RUSADA of its compliance status and came up with a recommendation of additional sanctions against Russian sports.
The world’s governing anti-doping body announced on September 23 that it had initiated a probe into the compliance status of RUSADA with the organization’s Code based on inconsistencies found in the data from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory.
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).