RUSADA, Russia’s anti-doping agency, hosted a series of educational seminars for national teams in various aquatic sports in preparation for this summer’s FINA World Aquatics Championships.
The RUSADA website reports that representatives from national teams in multiple sports attended the seminars. The World Championships will run events in pool swimming, open water swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and water polo.
The seminars focused on anti-doping procedures, aiming to help prepare athletes, coaches, athletic trainers and other team personnel for doping control policies at this summer’s World Championships.
The names of some of the seminars, per RUSADA:
- “Types of violations of anti-doping rules and responsibility for their violation”
- “Doping control procedures: the rights and obligations athlete”
- “World Anti-Doping Code of 2015”
- “Rules of providing information on the whereabouts of the athlete.”
RUSADA also hosted a seminar back in May for team medical personnel. That seminar ran through changes in the WADA banned substances list. Changes in what substances are banned by WADA have led to positive tests in swimming, most notably in the case of Chinese world record-holder Sun Yang, who tested positive for Trimetazidine just a few months after the substance first became illegal under WADA rules.
Russia has had plenty of high-profile struggles with anti-doping procedures recently. Most notable was world record-setting breaststroker Yulia Efimova, who was suspended for a year and a half after a positive doping test and just became re-eligible to compete, but she was far from the only Russian swimmer to have doping trouble. In fact, a string of multiple Russian athletes failing doping tests led the Russian sports minister to worry publicly that a few more violations could see the entire Russian swimming federation get suspended.