WADA recommends all-sport Olympic ban on Russia

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has recommended that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) ban all Russian athletes, regardless of sport, from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

The IOC said in a statement that it “will now carefully study the complex and detailed allegations.” It has called an emergency meeting for Tuesday to discuss and decide on the participation of Russian athletes in the upcoming Olympics.

“The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games,” IOC president Thomas Bach said in the statement. “Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated.”

WADA’s recommendation is the agency’s response to its investigation into Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. It published the full results of the investigation Monday in the 103-page McLaren Investigation Report. The report found that Russia’s government and sports governing bodies had engaged in doping that spanned 28 Olympic sports and covered up 312 positive tests.

Russia’s cheating program involved tampering with urine samples. Some Russian officials circumvented security to swap in clean urine samples for those that contained traces of performance-enhancing drugs. The full report can be found here.

Russian track-and-field athletes had already been banned by the IAAF from the Rio games. Now all of its athletes could be barred from the Olympics.

Responding to the report, USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said in a statement, “the current anti-doping system is broken” and called on WADA and the IOC to “impose sanctions that are appropriate in relation to the magnitude of these offenses, and that give clean athletes some measure of comfort that they will be competing on a level playing field in Rio.”

Here are WADA’s complete recommendations:

1. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) to consider, under their respective Charters, to decline entries, for Rio 2016, of all athletes submitted by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee.
2. The International Federations (IFs) from sports implicated in the McLaren Report to consider their responsibilities under the World Anti-Doping Code (Code) as far as their Russian National Federations (NFs) are concerned.
3. Russian government officials to be denied access to international competitions, including Rio 2016.
4. The Russian National Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) to remain non-compliant under the Code and its staffing and independence to be further reviewed by WADA.
5. The accreditation process of the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow (Moscow laboratory) to be stopped.
6. The FIFA Ethics Committee to look into allegations concerning football and the role played by a member of its Executive Committee, Minister Vitaly Mutko.
7. Professor McLaren and his team to complete their mandate provided WADA can secure the funding that would be required.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, said that all Russian officials implicated in the McLaren report as directly responsible will be suspended. “We are witnessing a dangerous relapse of politics’ interference into sports,” he said.