Post by TsarSamuil on Dec 12, 2019 18:44:21 GMT -5
WADA bans Russia from major sporting events for 4 years.
RT
Dec 9, 2019
Russia has been handed a four-year ban from major sporting events, including the Olympics and football World Cup, after the Executive Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) approved sanctions on Monday.
Meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 12-member WADA Executive Committee voted unanimously for measures against Russia earlier recommended by the organization’s Compliance Committee.
The move comes after Russia was alleged to have manipulated data provided to WADA from a Moscow anti-doping laboratory in January, which Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) chief Yuri Ganus later agreed to be true.
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‘Anti-Russia hysteria got chronic’: PM Medvedev slams WADA ban on Russian athletes.
RT.com
9 Dec, 2019 16:44
WADA’s decision to ban Russia from the Olympics and all major sports events for four years is the offshoot of anti-Russia hysteria, PM Dmitry Medvedev has said, calling on the authorities to challenge the decision in court.
The blanket ban on Russian athletes appears to be a continuation of today’s geopolitics, gripped by the ‘Russia scare’ for quite some time, the Prime Minister said Monday. He pointed to the persistent attempts to punish the country and its athletes.
“The fact that such decisions are taken repeatedly – and often in relation to the athletes who have already been punished one way or another – suggests that this is the continuation of the anti-Russian hysteria, which has already got into a chronic form,” he said.
Russian sports have had issues with doping, which are “impossible to deny,” Medvedev admitted. But WADA’s harsh decision on Monday should be appealed, the PM said, calling upon the officials and organizations overseeing professional sports to challenge it in court.
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee voted unanimously to declare the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) non-compliant, and banned the country from the Olympic Games and world championships for four years. The ban follows allegations that data, provided to WADA by a Moscow anti-doping lab early this year, had been tampered with.
RUSADA has 21 days to challenge the ban. Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov said they will file an appeal.
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WADA’s Russia doping ban is a ‘war of politics’ that ‘robs clean athletes of glory’
RT.com
9 Dec, 2019 19:09
Russia’s ban from global sports is a punishment rife with politics, analysts told RT. Worse still, political decisions can punish clean athletes, who will be denied the honor of competing for their country.
The World Anti-Doping Agency handed down the ban on Monday, after Russia was alleged to have manipulated data in a Moscow anti-doping laboratory. WADA voted to suspend Russia from all major sporting events for four years in response, meaning the Russian flag will not fly at the next two Olympic Games as well as the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, should Russia qualify.
Clean athletes, however, will be able to compete, albeit under a neutral flag and with no national anthem.
In the runup to the ban, US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) head Travis Tygart had called for even harsher penalties, including a blanket ban on all athletes, even those found to be clean.
The “political element to this cannot be denied,” global affairs analyst Patrick Henningsen told RT. Henningsen sees WADA, like many other international organizations, as biased in favor of its Western members.
“[It’s] about humiliating Russia, it’s about demoralizing their athletes, [and] It’s also about hurting Vladimir Putin.”
“National pride is connected with national sport for any leader of any country,” he added.
Russia’s image will certainly be tarnished by the news, which broke just hours before Putin was due to sit down with French, German, and Ukrainian leaders in Paris, in a bid to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine. With the Paris summit being a long-awaited ‘Normandy Format’ meeting – first since 2016 – the stakes are high for all involved.
“It’s bad news for that event,” political analyst Martin McCauley told RT. “The newspapers will concentrate on this and not on the Normandy event.” Likewise, the emergence of the news so close to the summit will likely give ample fodder to journalists quizzing Putin after the meetings conclude.
Clean athletes caught in a ‘war of politics’
Those athletes untainted by doping scandals have been “caught up in a war of politics,” McCauley said. Though such athletes will be allowed to compete, standing on the podium without their national colors and celebrating without their national anthem reverberating through the arena will be “devastating,” he said.
“When they get home with a medal, it’s only 90 percent of a medal, because the other competing athletes had their national anthem played, and they had their moment of glory. The Russians are going to be denied that.”
Competing under a neutral flag is a “very small consolation,” Henningsen added. “Even during the Cold War most countries respected the sporting arena as a neutral arena where politics wasn’t really going to contaminate that.”
“Clearly, this is a US-led, a Western-led effort that should be considered absolutely part and parcel of the new Cold War.”
Athletes typically spend their entire lives training to reach peak performance for one, maybe two, Olympic Games. However, all is not entirely lost for those who were hoping to represent Russia at next year’s Summer Olympics in Tokyo. “The Russians can appeal,” McCauley noted, “and one would expect they’d appeal very strongly indeed.”
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) will now decide whether to appeal the ban. Russian parliamentarian and former Olympic speed skater Svetlana Zhurova said she is “100 percent sure” the agency will appeal.
RUSADA has not had its work restricted by the WADA decision. Agency chief Yuri Ganus – a longtime critic of doping in Russia who has acknowledged that the data handed over to WADA was tampered with – said on Monday that “WADA considers our actions to be effective and productive. And we are an example of overcoming the crisis.”
“We will work on finding our way out of the crisis for our sport. We will ensure the compliance of our federations and with the code and the training of our athletes.”
Through appeal and reform, Ganus hopes to make Russian athletics clean again. His mission is one with political payoff too. Henningsen noted the power of international sport to build “person to person diplomacy,” fostering good relations between countries, even when their leaders can’t seem to agree on much else. The positive experiences of fans who traveled to Russia for last year’s World Cup – against the advice of much of the western media – were an example of this, he said.
A thaw on this front of the “New Cold War” would therefore be a welcome development, even if relations elsewhere remain decidedly icy.
--------------
Absolute power: How WADA became the judge, jury and executioner of world sports.
RT.com
10 Dec, 2019 22:04
Russia’s four-year sporting ban has demonstrated the extent of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) ability to decide the fate of entire nations in the world of sport. How did a single bureaucracy gain such absolute power?
Earlier this week, WADA banned Russia from hosting or competing in international sporting events for four years, over alleged manipulation of data from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory. The ban covers next summer’s Olympics in Japan and the FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar. It will affect thousands of professional athletes who never took any banned substances and only dreamed to win in a jersey with the Russian flag while their national anthem plays.
Russians will still be able to compete at international sports events as neutrals, but only if they get WADA approval – meaning that they now have to prove their innocence. Moscow called the WADA decision politically motivated “collective punishment” and is now preparing to challenge it at the top sports court.
How was one single entity allowed to accumulate such power, defining the fate of entire nations in the world of sports, without an external system of checks and balances?
Dreams of clean sport
WADA owes its existence to the Lausanne Declaration, adopted in 1999 at the first World Conference on Doping in Sport spearheaded by the International Olympic Committee. The conference itself was largely a result of a massive doping scandal that rocked the sports world the previous year. At that time, several prominent professional cycling teams were caught doping, not as a result of then-existing drugs tests but thanks to police raids.
Shattered by the doping revelations and tired of the existing chaotic doping prevention system’s inability to effectively fight cheating in sports, the IOC pleaded for the creation of a new universal body to lead and coordinate this work.
This plea was heard, and several months later led to the creation of WADA, an “independent International Anti-Doping Agency” granted unprecedented authority ranging from “expanding out-of-competition testing” and “coordinating research” of doping substances to “harmonizing scientific and technical standards” of anti-doping measures all over the world.
In the following years, the international community was still apparently fascinated by its dream of creating a sort of a God of fair sports – a body capable of sorting out all the doping problems on its own, while being free from any outside influence.
As a result, both sports organizations and national governments consistently focused on making WADA as independent as possible, while apparently paying much less attention to such things as the body’s internal transparency.
Four years after its establishment, the agency was given financial independence from IOC, which had poured cash into WADA since its inception. An elaborate funding system was devised instead, which saw half the WADA funding coming from IOC with the second half being provided by the national governments on the basis of special quotas, based on national GDP and population size.
The World Anti-Doping Code – a document designed by WADA to become no less than the Holy Writ in the struggle to stop cheaters in sports – eventually granted the agency sweeping controlling powers over almost all other sports bodies. It regulated all major aspects of international anti-doping campaigns, from defining anti-doping rule violations to the list of banned substances and testing and investigative practices.
The code was broadly accepted by the international and national sports bodies, which apparently sought some clear guidelines in this field. It was adopted in 2003 and eventually signed by most international sports bodies and national sports federations, Olympic committees and anti-doping agencies, making WADA the virtual custodian of this anti-doping Bible.
A 2005 International Convention against Doping in Sport, adopted by UNESCO and eventually ratified by 180 states, formalized the Code rules for the governments, thus putting them under sort of moral pressure in terms of complying with the system essentially created by WADA.
Genie out of the bottle
Yet as WADA powers grew, so did the concerns about its suspected lack of transparency and flawed methods. The agency has turned into a judge, jury and executioner rolled into one, as it was essentially responsible for both defining which substances should be considered illegal for athletes, as well as for testing and investigating the very same athletes and eventually imposing sanctions against them.
This fact did not escape the attention of some scientists, including Erik Boye, a renowned Norwegian cell biologist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Biosciences of the University of Oslo. He argued that the WADA doping control mechanism has turned into an opaque system, hesitant to admit its mistakes. Others questioned WADA’s list of banned substances, arguing that it lacks scientific justification.
Meanwhile, the only existing way for the affected athletes – and entire nations for that matter – to dispute WADA’s decisions has been the Court of Arbitration for Sport. However, the CAS does not control WADA in any way, but simply handles the disputes between the agency and those it considered to be in violation of its anti-doping rules.
Even then, the court is in WADA’s power to some extent, at least according to Boye and those that share his view.
“The lawyers residing in the panels of CAS hearings frequently meet with WADA-accredited scientists and develop a confidence in their expertise that may run counter to trusting opposing and unfamiliar expertise. This lack of power balance is not fair to the athlete,” the Norwegian scientist wrote in one of his opinion pieces on the matter.
By giving the agency a growing number of powers over the past few decades, the world of sports has unwittingly found itself entangled in its web. As WADA has arguably grown too powerful and unaccountable, neither the international sports bodies nor the national governments managed to create an effective oversight body.
The consequences were not long in coming.
Deus ex Machina
In 2017, the agency has seemingly tightened its grip on the sports world by linking the World Anti-Doping Code to its internally adopted regulation detailing the sanctions against any potential “non-compliant” entities.
In the blink of an eye, the foundation of the international anti-doping system that was once signed by some 660 sports bodies from all over the world – and later amended by a no less representative third World Conference on Doping in Sport – was changed by WADA’s own Foundation Board, to make it easier for the agency to go after suspected cheats, as one media outlet put it.
The agency that has for years been spared any outside oversight did not need approval of all those sporting bodies to do that. The amendments to the Code and a new Compliance Standard were simply passed by a 38-member board. WADA then simply mentioned this fact in one of its press releases, among other issues, as if it was not a big deal.
The board is of course supposed to represent the interests of each and every sports-related body around the world, as it is also formed in accordance with a complex system involving quotas for IOC, athletes and national authorities – but an approval by 38 people is in no way equal to support of hundreds of national and international sports organizations.
Thus the document dubbed International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories was declared “a mandatory International Standard that forms an essential part of the World Anti-Doping Program” by WADA. Some of the measures envisioned by it were then promptly applied to Russia, setting a precedent for WADA virtually banishing an entire nation from international sports.
The sanctions against Russia, as severe as they are, might not in fact be the harshest ones possible. The WADA document certainly does not hold back when describing various forms of punishment, including partial and total bans for a nation to participate in international sporting events and even nothing less than “suspension of recognition by the Olympic Movement and/or of membership of the Paralympic Movement.”
It may well turn out that the sporting fate of entire nations will depend on the 38 members of WADA’s Foundation Board, or the even less representative 12-member executive committee – as there is simply no one out there who can oversee, much less override, their decisions.
In its drive to help the sports world combat doping violations, the international community genuinely sought to create an ultimate authority to tackle all the doping-associated problems at once. By concentrating all that power in one place, however, they seem to have created not a god of fair sport, but something more like a runaway Frankenstein’s monster.
RT
Dec 9, 2019
Russia has been handed a four-year ban from major sporting events, including the Olympics and football World Cup, after the Executive Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) approved sanctions on Monday.
Meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 12-member WADA Executive Committee voted unanimously for measures against Russia earlier recommended by the organization’s Compliance Committee.
The move comes after Russia was alleged to have manipulated data provided to WADA from a Moscow anti-doping laboratory in January, which Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) chief Yuri Ganus later agreed to be true.
--------------
‘Anti-Russia hysteria got chronic’: PM Medvedev slams WADA ban on Russian athletes.
RT.com
9 Dec, 2019 16:44
WADA’s decision to ban Russia from the Olympics and all major sports events for four years is the offshoot of anti-Russia hysteria, PM Dmitry Medvedev has said, calling on the authorities to challenge the decision in court.
The blanket ban on Russian athletes appears to be a continuation of today’s geopolitics, gripped by the ‘Russia scare’ for quite some time, the Prime Minister said Monday. He pointed to the persistent attempts to punish the country and its athletes.
“The fact that such decisions are taken repeatedly – and often in relation to the athletes who have already been punished one way or another – suggests that this is the continuation of the anti-Russian hysteria, which has already got into a chronic form,” he said.
Russian sports have had issues with doping, which are “impossible to deny,” Medvedev admitted. But WADA’s harsh decision on Monday should be appealed, the PM said, calling upon the officials and organizations overseeing professional sports to challenge it in court.
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee voted unanimously to declare the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) non-compliant, and banned the country from the Olympic Games and world championships for four years. The ban follows allegations that data, provided to WADA by a Moscow anti-doping lab early this year, had been tampered with.
RUSADA has 21 days to challenge the ban. Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov said they will file an appeal.
--------------
WADA’s Russia doping ban is a ‘war of politics’ that ‘robs clean athletes of glory’
RT.com
9 Dec, 2019 19:09
Russia’s ban from global sports is a punishment rife with politics, analysts told RT. Worse still, political decisions can punish clean athletes, who will be denied the honor of competing for their country.
The World Anti-Doping Agency handed down the ban on Monday, after Russia was alleged to have manipulated data in a Moscow anti-doping laboratory. WADA voted to suspend Russia from all major sporting events for four years in response, meaning the Russian flag will not fly at the next two Olympic Games as well as the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, should Russia qualify.
Clean athletes, however, will be able to compete, albeit under a neutral flag and with no national anthem.
In the runup to the ban, US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) head Travis Tygart had called for even harsher penalties, including a blanket ban on all athletes, even those found to be clean.
The “political element to this cannot be denied,” global affairs analyst Patrick Henningsen told RT. Henningsen sees WADA, like many other international organizations, as biased in favor of its Western members.
“[It’s] about humiliating Russia, it’s about demoralizing their athletes, [and] It’s also about hurting Vladimir Putin.”
“National pride is connected with national sport for any leader of any country,” he added.
Russia’s image will certainly be tarnished by the news, which broke just hours before Putin was due to sit down with French, German, and Ukrainian leaders in Paris, in a bid to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine. With the Paris summit being a long-awaited ‘Normandy Format’ meeting – first since 2016 – the stakes are high for all involved.
“It’s bad news for that event,” political analyst Martin McCauley told RT. “The newspapers will concentrate on this and not on the Normandy event.” Likewise, the emergence of the news so close to the summit will likely give ample fodder to journalists quizzing Putin after the meetings conclude.
Clean athletes caught in a ‘war of politics’
Those athletes untainted by doping scandals have been “caught up in a war of politics,” McCauley said. Though such athletes will be allowed to compete, standing on the podium without their national colors and celebrating without their national anthem reverberating through the arena will be “devastating,” he said.
“When they get home with a medal, it’s only 90 percent of a medal, because the other competing athletes had their national anthem played, and they had their moment of glory. The Russians are going to be denied that.”
Competing under a neutral flag is a “very small consolation,” Henningsen added. “Even during the Cold War most countries respected the sporting arena as a neutral arena where politics wasn’t really going to contaminate that.”
“Clearly, this is a US-led, a Western-led effort that should be considered absolutely part and parcel of the new Cold War.”
Athletes typically spend their entire lives training to reach peak performance for one, maybe two, Olympic Games. However, all is not entirely lost for those who were hoping to represent Russia at next year’s Summer Olympics in Tokyo. “The Russians can appeal,” McCauley noted, “and one would expect they’d appeal very strongly indeed.”
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) will now decide whether to appeal the ban. Russian parliamentarian and former Olympic speed skater Svetlana Zhurova said she is “100 percent sure” the agency will appeal.
RUSADA has not had its work restricted by the WADA decision. Agency chief Yuri Ganus – a longtime critic of doping in Russia who has acknowledged that the data handed over to WADA was tampered with – said on Monday that “WADA considers our actions to be effective and productive. And we are an example of overcoming the crisis.”
“We will work on finding our way out of the crisis for our sport. We will ensure the compliance of our federations and with the code and the training of our athletes.”
Through appeal and reform, Ganus hopes to make Russian athletics clean again. His mission is one with political payoff too. Henningsen noted the power of international sport to build “person to person diplomacy,” fostering good relations between countries, even when their leaders can’t seem to agree on much else. The positive experiences of fans who traveled to Russia for last year’s World Cup – against the advice of much of the western media – were an example of this, he said.
A thaw on this front of the “New Cold War” would therefore be a welcome development, even if relations elsewhere remain decidedly icy.
--------------
Absolute power: How WADA became the judge, jury and executioner of world sports.
RT.com
10 Dec, 2019 22:04
Russia’s four-year sporting ban has demonstrated the extent of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) ability to decide the fate of entire nations in the world of sport. How did a single bureaucracy gain such absolute power?
Earlier this week, WADA banned Russia from hosting or competing in international sporting events for four years, over alleged manipulation of data from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory. The ban covers next summer’s Olympics in Japan and the FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar. It will affect thousands of professional athletes who never took any banned substances and only dreamed to win in a jersey with the Russian flag while their national anthem plays.
Russians will still be able to compete at international sports events as neutrals, but only if they get WADA approval – meaning that they now have to prove their innocence. Moscow called the WADA decision politically motivated “collective punishment” and is now preparing to challenge it at the top sports court.
How was one single entity allowed to accumulate such power, defining the fate of entire nations in the world of sports, without an external system of checks and balances?
Dreams of clean sport
WADA owes its existence to the Lausanne Declaration, adopted in 1999 at the first World Conference on Doping in Sport spearheaded by the International Olympic Committee. The conference itself was largely a result of a massive doping scandal that rocked the sports world the previous year. At that time, several prominent professional cycling teams were caught doping, not as a result of then-existing drugs tests but thanks to police raids.
Shattered by the doping revelations and tired of the existing chaotic doping prevention system’s inability to effectively fight cheating in sports, the IOC pleaded for the creation of a new universal body to lead and coordinate this work.
This plea was heard, and several months later led to the creation of WADA, an “independent International Anti-Doping Agency” granted unprecedented authority ranging from “expanding out-of-competition testing” and “coordinating research” of doping substances to “harmonizing scientific and technical standards” of anti-doping measures all over the world.
In the following years, the international community was still apparently fascinated by its dream of creating a sort of a God of fair sports – a body capable of sorting out all the doping problems on its own, while being free from any outside influence.
As a result, both sports organizations and national governments consistently focused on making WADA as independent as possible, while apparently paying much less attention to such things as the body’s internal transparency.
Four years after its establishment, the agency was given financial independence from IOC, which had poured cash into WADA since its inception. An elaborate funding system was devised instead, which saw half the WADA funding coming from IOC with the second half being provided by the national governments on the basis of special quotas, based on national GDP and population size.
The World Anti-Doping Code – a document designed by WADA to become no less than the Holy Writ in the struggle to stop cheaters in sports – eventually granted the agency sweeping controlling powers over almost all other sports bodies. It regulated all major aspects of international anti-doping campaigns, from defining anti-doping rule violations to the list of banned substances and testing and investigative practices.
The code was broadly accepted by the international and national sports bodies, which apparently sought some clear guidelines in this field. It was adopted in 2003 and eventually signed by most international sports bodies and national sports federations, Olympic committees and anti-doping agencies, making WADA the virtual custodian of this anti-doping Bible.
A 2005 International Convention against Doping in Sport, adopted by UNESCO and eventually ratified by 180 states, formalized the Code rules for the governments, thus putting them under sort of moral pressure in terms of complying with the system essentially created by WADA.
Genie out of the bottle
Yet as WADA powers grew, so did the concerns about its suspected lack of transparency and flawed methods. The agency has turned into a judge, jury and executioner rolled into one, as it was essentially responsible for both defining which substances should be considered illegal for athletes, as well as for testing and investigating the very same athletes and eventually imposing sanctions against them.
This fact did not escape the attention of some scientists, including Erik Boye, a renowned Norwegian cell biologist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Biosciences of the University of Oslo. He argued that the WADA doping control mechanism has turned into an opaque system, hesitant to admit its mistakes. Others questioned WADA’s list of banned substances, arguing that it lacks scientific justification.
Meanwhile, the only existing way for the affected athletes – and entire nations for that matter – to dispute WADA’s decisions has been the Court of Arbitration for Sport. However, the CAS does not control WADA in any way, but simply handles the disputes between the agency and those it considered to be in violation of its anti-doping rules.
Even then, the court is in WADA’s power to some extent, at least according to Boye and those that share his view.
“The lawyers residing in the panels of CAS hearings frequently meet with WADA-accredited scientists and develop a confidence in their expertise that may run counter to trusting opposing and unfamiliar expertise. This lack of power balance is not fair to the athlete,” the Norwegian scientist wrote in one of his opinion pieces on the matter.
By giving the agency a growing number of powers over the past few decades, the world of sports has unwittingly found itself entangled in its web. As WADA has arguably grown too powerful and unaccountable, neither the international sports bodies nor the national governments managed to create an effective oversight body.
The consequences were not long in coming.
Deus ex Machina
In 2017, the agency has seemingly tightened its grip on the sports world by linking the World Anti-Doping Code to its internally adopted regulation detailing the sanctions against any potential “non-compliant” entities.
In the blink of an eye, the foundation of the international anti-doping system that was once signed by some 660 sports bodies from all over the world – and later amended by a no less representative third World Conference on Doping in Sport – was changed by WADA’s own Foundation Board, to make it easier for the agency to go after suspected cheats, as one media outlet put it.
The agency that has for years been spared any outside oversight did not need approval of all those sporting bodies to do that. The amendments to the Code and a new Compliance Standard were simply passed by a 38-member board. WADA then simply mentioned this fact in one of its press releases, among other issues, as if it was not a big deal.
The board is of course supposed to represent the interests of each and every sports-related body around the world, as it is also formed in accordance with a complex system involving quotas for IOC, athletes and national authorities – but an approval by 38 people is in no way equal to support of hundreds of national and international sports organizations.
Thus the document dubbed International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories was declared “a mandatory International Standard that forms an essential part of the World Anti-Doping Program” by WADA. Some of the measures envisioned by it were then promptly applied to Russia, setting a precedent for WADA virtually banishing an entire nation from international sports.
The sanctions against Russia, as severe as they are, might not in fact be the harshest ones possible. The WADA document certainly does not hold back when describing various forms of punishment, including partial and total bans for a nation to participate in international sporting events and even nothing less than “suspension of recognition by the Olympic Movement and/or of membership of the Paralympic Movement.”
It may well turn out that the sporting fate of entire nations will depend on the 38 members of WADA’s Foundation Board, or the even less representative 12-member executive committee – as there is simply no one out there who can oversee, much less override, their decisions.
In its drive to help the sports world combat doping violations, the international community genuinely sought to create an ultimate authority to tackle all the doping-associated problems at once. By concentrating all that power in one place, however, they seem to have created not a god of fair sport, but something more like a runaway Frankenstein’s monster.
