A key World Anti-Doping Agency committee has recommended Russia face a four-year ban from global sports after investigators discovered that Russian officials had erased failed doping tests from a database submitted to antidoping regulators. The recommendations, if approved, would result in Russian athletes and teams barred not only from next year’s Tokyo Olympics but from a series of other major sports competitions.
Under the recommendations, Russian athletes would compete at a second straight Olympic Games in neutral uniforms and collect any medals they win without the raising of the nation’s flag or the playing of its anthem.
The proposed punishments were included in a report produced by a WADA committee led by the British lawyer Jonathan Taylor. His panel has, for several years, been investigating Russian compliance with global antidoping rules after an earlier scandal; among the conclusions it reached was that Russia deliberately manipulated a database of test results turned over to WADA as part of the settlement of an earlier doping investigation to conceal failed drug tests by Russian athletes.
A final ruling on the proposed punishments is expected on Dec. 9, when WADA’s board meets in Paris. It is expected to agree with the recommendations. Any decision by WADA would be subject to appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
A WADA spokesman declined to comment on the report or its findings.
The decision to bar Russia and impose restrictions on its athletes and teams is the latest chapter in a scandal that first emerged in 2015 with revelations of a sprawling state-sponsored doping program that was remarkable in its scale and sophistication.
If WADA’s board, as expected, agrees with Taylor’s recommendations, Russian athletes will only be allowed to compete in Tokyo in similar fashion to the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. At those Games, individual sports federations were allowed to clear specific participants, and the same standard may be applied next year, according to people with direct knowledge of the report’s contents. In Pyeongchang, Russians with clean doping records marched behind the Olympic flag and competed with the specially created designation Olympic Athlete From Russia.
But the proposed penalties will affect Russian sports well beyond the Olympic Games. According to people who have seen the report, the recommendations call for Russia to be barred from all international competitions for four years by governing bodies who are signatories to the WADA code, a group that includes soccer’s governing body, FIFA, the organizer of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The report also calls for Russian government officials to be barred from attending sporting events and for the country to be barred from hosting — or even bidding for — sporting events for four years, meaning Russia’s exile as a host could stretch much further, according to people familiar with the matter. The officials declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the report’s contents.
Still, the prospect of hundreds of Russian athletes in Tokyo — even if they have been cleared to compete — is likely to be criticized by some athletes groups and national doping agencies, who remain angry that the country has not been sufficiently held to account for running a huge doping program that called into question results at several Olympics and dozens of other competitions. But it would conform with the views of the International Olympic Committee’s president, Thomas Bach, who opposes anything resembling a blanket ban.
“Our principle is that the guilty ones must be punished as hard as possible and the innocent ones must be protected,” Bach said last week.
Under regulations adopted in 2018, WADA has complete authority to punish Russia, something that was not the case when the scandal first emerged after the Sochi Olympics. At the time, individual sports federations, including the I.O.C., were allowed to deal with Russia’s cheating on their own. The results were mixed, with several federations failing to act decisively and the I.O.C. welcoming Russia back into the fold almost immediately after the Pyeongchang Games, even though it had yet to be cleared by WADA.
WADA finally reinstated Russia’s antidoping agency last year, though it reserved the right to revoke that clearance and issue stronger punishments if Russia did not provide athlete data from the Moscow laboratory at the heart of the cheating scandal. In September, WADA investigators discovered that the data submitted had been altered, and the organization told Russia that it needed to provide compelling justification for the changes or face grave punishment.
Having judged Russia’s response to be inadequate, Taylor’s committee prepared a report, which was sent to WADA board members late last week.
The severity of the punishment, which will almost certainly be appealed if WADA’s board adopts the Taylor committee recommendations, immediately created uncertainty for other major sporting events, including next summer’s European soccer championships, for which Russia, whose team has qualified, is providing one of the host cities.
The penalties are in line with recent comments from Yuri Ganus, the head of Russia’s antidoping agency, who has been vocal in his criticism of Russia’s handling of the doping crisis and who predicted a multiyear ban.
Ganus said that by deleting the data, Russian officials had created the “biggest crisis” yet for sports in the country, which remains under the shadow of the cheating program that was directed by its former antidoping head Grigory Rodchenkov, with support of the country’s intelligence services, according to an independent investigation. Rodchenkov now lives in the United States after he revealed the scheme he created and ran.
It is unclear how many Russian athletes could be barred from competing if the new recommendations lead to a series of eligibility reviews. But WADA officials said they had identified the Russians whose data was missing from the manipulated database provided to the organization.
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