Russia avoids new doping penalties over missed deadline

Russia remains under scrutiny even though it will not be punished for missing a December deadline to allow access to the Moscow laboratory at the centre of alleged state-sponsored doping, the World Anti-Doping Agency said Tuesday.

WADA's Executive Committee decided to take no further action at a meeting earlier in the day.

"Several members of the (Executive Committee) voiced their disappointment that the deadline had been missed but agreed that no sanction in that regard should be imposed," WADA President Craig Reedie said.

WADA had conditionally lifted a ban on RUSADA in September last year, with one of the conditions being the granting of access to thousands of samples at the tainted Moscow lab by the end of 2018.

But when a WADA team arrived last month, Russian authorities raised issues with the certification of their equipment under Russian law. The data was eventually extracted this month.

Reedie and Jonathan Taylor, who heads WADA's Compliance Review Committee (CRC), both said that the agency had followed its rules and precedents set in other cases.

"Data was provided late. Data was provided after the deadline," Taylor said, before adding: "We decided this case should be treated the same as others."
"Obviously change is needed for a global system that holds athletes strictly accountable but allows states to corrupt the Olympic Games and perpetuate massive fraud on athletes and the public."
"We will now proceed to authenticating the data that has been retrieved," he said. "We want to make sure that those who've cheated are held to account."
WADA warned on Tuesday that if any doping data from Russia was tampered with, it would take "the most stringent sanctions."
When Gunter Younger, Director of WADA's Intelligence and Investigations Department, was asked if the data could have been altered, he told a conference call with reporters: "It's complicated to (tamper with) the individual documents because they need to be consistent, but we are not too naive. We are going to look for any hints of falsification of the data."