Russia banned from Olympics and football World Cup 

Anti-doping agency excludes country from big sporting events for four years

Russia will be banned from the Tokyo Olympics and football World Cup in 2022 after the World Anti-Doping Agency imposed a four-year exclusion for failing to comply with drugs testing rules. 

Wada voted to ban Russia from all big sporting events for tampering with test result data that were then handed over for compliance checks this year. 

The doping agency only reinstated Russia in 2018 after a three-year sporting ban during which the country was not allowed to test its own athletes or participate in the Olympics under its own flag.

“For too long, Russian doping has detracted from clean sport,” Craig Reedie, Wada president, said in a statement on Monday. “Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order and rejoin the global anti-doping community for the good of its athletes and of the integrity of sport, but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial.”

The Wada ruling means the Russian team that has regularly appeared towards the top of the Olympic medals table will be banned from next year’s Games in Japan, although clean athletes may still be able to participate.

Russian officials will also be banned from attending international sporting events and the country will be ineligible to host them.

The ban includes the next football World Cup in Qatar but does not apply to matches at next year’s European football championship and the 2021 Champions League final to be held in St Petersburg, because organiser Uefa is not considered a “major event organisation”.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, acknowledged on Monday that Russia had “significant problems with doping” but said the ban was a “continuation of chronic anti-Russian hysteria”.

Ed Moses, the former Olympic 400m hurdles champion now on the board of the US Anti-Doping Agency, said he saw little reason to think that Russia would alter its behaviour. “I am not at all optimistic that this is going to change [attitudes],” he told Euronews. “They have had three swings at the bat and struck out three times.”

Wada called on all sporting bodies that have signed up to its code to uphold the ban, which includes the International Olympic Committee and Fifa, football’s global governing body. Fifa told state-owned network RT that it was in contact with Wada to “clarify the extent of the decision in regards to football”.

Rusada, Russia’s anti-doping agency, said it would decide within 10 days whether to appeal. Any challenge would be heard at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The previous Wada ban followed revelations by whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, a former head of the Moscow lab, outlining how Russian anti-doping officials helped athletes take performance-enhancing drugs over several years and that government and security officials assisted in the cover-up.

Russia was later stripped of some of the medals its athletes won at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2012 London Games. Although Russia was banned from last year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, 168 of its athletes were able to compete under a neutral flag.

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Although Russia was readmitted in 2018, Wada announced in September that evidence from Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory handed over as part of Russia’s reinstatement process was “neither complete nor fully authentic”.

As well as altering some data and deleting other data, Wada said Russia tried to cover up its tampering by making it look like the details had been unchanged since 2015. 

Russia argued that Mr Rodchenkov had changed the data himself in a plot to extort money. But Wada investigators found that someone in the Moscow lab had altered the data as late as the day before it was handed over in January — many years after Mr Rodchenkov had fled Russia. Russian officials also fabricated messages purporting to be from Mr Rodchenkov and his colleagues, Wada said.

The latest doping scandal has opened up a rift between the new leadership of Rusada, which Wada said did not participate in the cover-up, and the unnamed senior government figures responsible for the tampering.

Rusada’s leadership has criticised the reaction of the Russian government to the ban, saying it showed it had not changed. “This is yet another reason for our sporting leadership to think about whether we are moving in the right direction,” Margarita Pakhnotskaya, deputy chief of Rusada, told Interfax. “It means our anti-doping culture has not changed.”