World Anti-Doping Agency committee recommends Russia face four-year ban from global sports

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)’s compliance committee recommended Monday that Russia’s top drug testing agency be banned from participation in global sports competitions for four years. If the recommendation is accepted it would effectively force Russian athletes to compete only as part of international teams cleared by other anti-doping agencies.

The move comes after the compliance committee found that the Russian agency had supplied manipulated data to inspectors.

“The CRC concluded that this is ‘an extremely serious case of non-compliance with the requirement to provide an authentic copy of the Moscow data, with several aggravating features,'” read a statement from WADA.

“Russian athletes and their support personnel may only participate in Major Events staged in the Four Year Period where they are able to demonstrate that they are not implicated in any way by the non-compliance,” WADA’s recommendation for consequences continued. “In this circumstance, they may not represent the Russian Federation.”

WADA’s executive committee will meet next month to decide whether to implement the compliance committee’s recommendations. A report from the committee revealed earlier this year that some data supplied by Russian investigators was “not complete or fully authentic,” according to WADA, and comes on the heels of Russia’s exclusion from the 2018 winter Olympic games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The December decision could cause Russia to be excluded from the 2020 summer Olympic games in Tokyo, as well as the 2022 winter Olympic games in Beijing.