WADA‘s Executive Committee will meet on December 9 to discuss recommendations for an ongoing compliance procedure with RUSADA, Russia’s anti-doping agency.
RUSADA is in jeopardy of losing its WADA compliance, less than two years after being reinstated. WADA agreed to reinstate Russia’s anti-doping agency in early 2018, despite RUSADA not meeting all of the original standards for reinstatement. One of the key terms of the new deal for reinstatement was that Russia release data from its Moscow anti-doping laboratory. Experts said the data was crucial to help build cases against athletes caught doping, and to exonerate athletes falsely suspected of being aided by what the McLaren Report deemed Russia’s institutionalized doping program.
Russia turned over that data (though there were some issues with timeliness relating to WADA‘s deadlines), but was later accused of manipulating the data. WADA gave RUSADA three weeks this fall to explain inconsistencies in the data, as the World Anti-Doping Agency proceeded with a ‘fast-track’ procedure that could revoke RUSADA‘s compliance once again.
This week, WADA shed some light on the next steps in that compliance procedure – though it mostly relies on an alphabet soup of internal pieces of the WADA machinery.
WADA says its Intelligence and Investigations (I&I) department provided a report to the WADA Compliance Review Committee (CRC). The I&I report was based on the inconsistencies found in the Moscow lab data, as well as the responses from Russia explaining those inconsistencies. Now that the CRC has the report, it will come to a formal recommendation to give to the WADA Executive Committee.
The upshot of all of this is that WADA‘s Executive Committee should meet on December 9 to discuss that recommendation. The Executive Committee is chaired by WADA President Craig Reedie, though his term only lasts through December 31, 2019.