The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has attained his investigation on 298 Russians athletes targeted in a doping inquiry and enacted the findings onto International federations for further activity on Thursday.
The WADA’s independent Intelligence and investigations (I&I ) team has conducted its ongoing ‘operation LIMS’ (1) and provided details to a total of 28 Anti Doping Organizations (ADOs), including 27 international Federations (IFs) and one Major Event Organization.
The WADA said in a statement that “The evidence available for each package is different, and relevant organizations will have to decide in each case whether to bring it forward as an Anti- Doping Rule Violations (ADRV) or not. WADA will review and discuss the facts with each ADO. WADA will also review the decisions rendered by the ADOs and appeal, if appropriate, to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In addition, WADA has the opinion under the World Anti -Doping Code (CODE), where no decision is rendered in a reasonable timeframe, to bring cases directly to CAS”.
153 cases out of 298 presented to 28 ADOs by WADA I&I are unchanged the manipulation that occurred in a none keeping case being brought by WADA against RUSADA, which ultimately resulted in WADA’s Executive Committee consenting on December 9 a proposal from the Agency’s independent Compliance Review Committee(CRC) to announce RUSADA non-compliant for a period of four years.
Within the target of 298, declared manipulation of the data relates to files of 145 athletes, a result of almost 50 per cent.
This will encourage the relevant organizations to record and analyze all available evidence. However, WADA has given packages for all 298 athletes even the files of those 145.
“This has been the most complex enquiry in anti-doping history and WADA’s investigations team has been doing an outstanding job. It has been a huge undertaking, involving thousands of samples, 24 terabytes of data(2), hundreds of athletes across 28 organizations, and it is delivering real results, ” WADA president Witold Banka said.
“This is not the end of the road. There is still more analysis of the samples retrieved from the former Moscow Laboratory that is ongoing. This reanalysis process, led by WADA, had already uncovered 57 cases that are results management phase, ” he added.
