WADA Committee Calls for RUSADA Reinstatement

(ATR) Russia’s anti-doping agency could be reinstated by the World Anti-Doping Agency Executive Committee next week.

WADA’s compliance review committee recommended to the executive committee that RUSADA be reinstated at the committee’s meeting on Sept. 20 in the Seychelles. RUSADA has been WADA non-compliant since November 2015 and needed to complete 25 criteria before reinstatement.

So far RUSADA has completed 23 of 25 criteria, with the sticking points being accepting the results of the two independent McLaren reports and access to data from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory.

The compliance committee said that it had "reviewed at length a letter from the Russian Ministry of Sport" which it believed met the first of the two outstanding criteria for reinstatement. As for the second, the compliance committee said it accepted a proposal from Russia to allow for an independent expert to turn over Moscow data to WADA.

"While WADA does not usually communicate CRC recommendations prior to their consideration by the ExCo, the Agency decided to do so in this case given the level of interest surrounding the matter and the amount of speculation," a statement from WADA said.

The decision by the compliance committee comes after the International Paralympic Committee penned a statement urging WADA to "resolve the ongoing stalemate".

"Since the IPC suspended the RPC in August 2016 a lot of progress has been made and both the RPC and WADA should be applauded for getting the situation to this point," Andrew Parsons, IPC President, said in a statement. "However, the stage we are at now is exactly where we were at six months ago and the IPC is growing increasingly concerned at the ongoing stalemate between RUSADA and WADA."

The United Kingdom Anti-Doping Athletes Commission also wrote a letter to WADA President Craig Reedie urging him to not lift the compliance of RUSADA until all conditions of the roadmap are fully met.

The letter called re-admitting RUSADA now "a catastrophe for clean sport".

"To ignore these conditions, ignores the wishes of the athletes you are there to protect," the letter read. "It will undermine trust in the essence of fair play on which sport is formed."

The IPC said if WADA were to reinstate RUSADA it would form a taskforce to assess the situation and brief the body's governing board. If Russia completes the two pieces required to have RUSADA reinstated by WADA it would only have to reimburse the IPC$299,384 "and cover, amongst other things, the IPC testing programme of Russian Para athletes and costs related to the IPC Taskforce".

"This is tremendous progress and a real breakthrough. We applaud the efforts of everyone involved to reach this stage," Parsons said in reaction to the WADA statement. "The IPC will now await the final decision of the WADA Executive Committee on this matter before taking the next steps in relation to the suspension of the Russian Paralympic Committee."

Written by Aaron Bauer

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