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Anti-Doping Investigators Recommend Four-Year Ban on Russia

Jamie Dettmer

   MOSCOW - Russia faces a four-year ban from global sporting events,
   including next year's Tokyo Olympics, because of a continued failure to
   cooperate with anti-doping investigators.

   The ban recommendation made Tuesday by the compliance panel of the
   World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), came after investigators found
   evidence of a further drug cover-up by Russian officials, who are
   alleged to have deleted and tampered with positive drugs tests from a
   database at a Moscow laboratory earlier this year.

   The executive committee of the anti-doping agency will decide at a
   meeting in Paris scheduled for December 9 whether to approve the
   sanction, including stripping Russia of sporting events already awarded
   to the country "unless it is legally or practically impossible to do
   so." Russian government officials would also be barred from attending
   events for the next four years and the country's flag wouldn't be flown
   at World sporting tournaments for the ban's period.

   Russia was banned from sending a team to the 2018 Winter Olympics in
   Pyeongchang, South Korea but individual athletes from the country were
   allowed by the International Olympic Committee to compete, if they
   passed strenuous doping tests. The new ban recommendation is the latest
   twist in a saga of state-sponsored doping stretching back to before the
   2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and which is said to rival in its magnitude
   the extensive and notorious East German drug program of the Cold War
   years.

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