MUNICH, October 20. /TASS/: A meeting of experts from Russia and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on the reported inconsistencies in data from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory has been postponed, Chair of the WADA Compliance Review Committee Jonathan Taylor told TASS on Sunday.
The meeting was expected to take place in Lausanne on October 23 to discuss Russia’s explanations to WADA on the inconsistencies in the data retrieved from the Moscow Anti-Doping Lab.
As the chair of the WADA Compliance Review Committee said, the world anti-doping body needs more time to analyze information it has received from Russia.
The meeting will also be essential to determine the date of a session of the WADA Compliance Review Committee to work out recommendations for the organization’s Executive Committee on the expediency of imposing sanctions on the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), Taylor said.
A decision on the expediency of imposing sanctions on the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) may be made at an extraordinary session of the WADA Executive Committee, which will take place after November 7 already under the organization’s new president, Taylor said.
WADA announced on September 23 that it had initiated a probe into the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency with the Code of the world’s governing anti-doping body based on the inconsistencies reportedly discovered in the data from the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory.
Specialists from WADA were granted access to the database of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory in January this year and copied 24 terabytes of information on Russian athletes’ doping samples collected between 2012 and 2015. WADA experts finished their work to retrieve doping samples from the Moscow Lab on April 30 having collected 2,262 doping samples in 4,524 containers (Samples A and B).
The WADA Executive Committee reinstated the compliance status of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) on September 20, 2018 on condition that WADA experts would be granted access before December 31, 2018 to doping samples at the Moscow Anti-Doping Lab, which was sealed off in connection with a federal investigation.
