Russia to appeal four-year ban from sport over anti-doping scandal as Putin labels it ‘unfair’

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) will appeal its four-year World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) ban from all forms of major sport, with the case set to be taken to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas).

Rusada’s supervisory board voted unanimously on Thursday to refer the case to the Cas in an attempt to have their ban from hosting and competing in major sporting events overturned, having met the 21 December deadline.

Supervisory board chairman Alexander Ivlev is hopeful that the case will be heard within the next two weeks, which would give an outcome on whether Russia will be represented at next summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo with three months of the hearing.

"The ball will be in Wada's court and the issue will be discussed in a legal context," Ivlev said. "We consider the argumentation to be fairly strong and we will see how the issue develops."

The decision must still be ratified by another panel of Russian sports and anti-doping officials, though Ivlev suggested that the confirmation will be a formality.

Rusada disagrees with the Wada decision, which will prevent Russian athletes from competing at the 2020 Olympics and 2022 World Cup under the nation’s name, flag and national anthem, and is understood to be supremely confident that it has the basis to have the appeal upheld.

A Wada investigation found that Rusada had deliberately tampered with anti-doping data as recently as the start of this year, despite missing their deadline to submit the relevant drugs tests to Wada officials by the end of 2018. In a report released last month, Wada’s intelligence and investigations team claimed that up to 135 athletes may now be protected from having positive drugs tests identified due to the failure to provide accurate and genuine samples from the Moscow laboratory.

A number of high-profile Russian officials, both within sport and the government, have hit out at Wada for what is the second serious sanction in the space of four years, following the initial suspension of the Moscow laboratory over a state-sponsored anti-doping programme on a never-before-seen scale.

Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Wada’s four-year ban over doping was not justified.

He said bans should be handed out on an individual, not collective, basis. Speaking at an annual press conference, Putin said: “It’s not fair. It doesn’t make sense and it runs counter to international law.

“If the vast majority of our athletes are clean, how can you slap a ban on them?”

Putin claimed that Russia’s team of figure skaters were “geniuses” and that the ban was directly influenced by preventing them from competing for medals at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

“It’s an attempt to get rid of competition,” he said. “Yes, you can do it. Will it help world sport? No.”