On Monday, Russia was banned for five years from competing in top-range sporting tournaments, including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and the 2022 soccer World Cup.
WADA voted unanimously on the decision after it found that Russia had tampered with laboratory data by “planting fake evidence and deleting files linked to positive doping tests that could have helped identify drug cheats.”
According to Reuters, “One of the conditions for the reinstatement of Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA, which was suspended in 2015 in the wake of the athletics doping scandal but reinstated last year, had been that Moscow provide[s] an authentic copy of the laboratory data. The sanctions effectively strip the agency of its accreditation.”
Last month, Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov blamed the discrepancies in the laboratory data to technical issues.
The decision by WADA, however, allows clean Russian athletes to compete at major international sporting events without the Russian flag or anthem during the moratorium, as they did during the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.
Russia’s punishment leaves the door open for clean Russian athletes to compete at major international sporting events without their flag or anthem for the next four years, something they did at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.