Russia banned from hosting/competing at major international events for 4 years

caseyedwards

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Of course this is a very dangerous decision for Russia’s clean athletes. With Russians being allowed in the doping may be rampant now and the incentive will be to dope or lose to government supported dopers
 

oleada

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Do we actually know for a fact that there was no explanation for individual athletes? I know that Bukin, for example, said there weren't but I also doubt they would have disclosed it if they were given a reason and I assume that Wada can't comment about issues of individuals as to not violate their privacy so they can't really refute those claims.
This is what I wonder about. There must be some punishment for Russia’s actions, but either athletes like Bukin are clean, and they were not allowed to participate in the Olympics, or they’re not and shouldn’t be allowed to compete at Worlds, either. That, to me, needs an explanation.
 

Tinami Amori

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barbk

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And that's not helping either.... Because instead of letting Russian entities find the guilty parties and take actions, it creates Nationalistic sentiment and all-russian belief that this is russophobia.
How are they going to do that if they were so invested in trying to tar the whistleblower? Who could trust that?

I am curious what -- if anything -- will happen to Alexander Lakernik, ISU First Vice President of Figure Skating. He's been smart and influential as figure skating has undergone changes this decade.

Lots of collateral damage here.
 

gotoschool

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What gets to me is the common thread that links the Russian power play memo on tech calls to the timing and wording of the doping findings. The Russian skating federation "requested" inconsistencies in tech scores to be addressed on its behalf after the Cup of China, which has corresponded to even more generous GOE, PCS, step sequence and tech calls for Russian women beginning with the Russian cup, NHK and now Grand Prix Final, making fair competition impossible in my opinion, and the fact that it corresponded so closely in time and wording to the WADA report saying that they found big "inconsistencies" in the doping results and calling for a new round of punishment. The timing is especially remarkable considering how rarely such a memo is issued and the presumption to issue such a memo when they have consistently been scored more generously even before the memo. The thing is that the Russian women would still be doing really well even if they were scored fairly just as other Russian athletes would be doing well, but it is the environment of privilege and presumption in flaunting fair competition and using great influence to preclude an even playing field that pervades the ideological structure of Russian sports authorities and those responsible for it which is only enhanced by hand slaps for state sponsored doping.

Consistent with this, I don't really understand how this alleged ban is going to do anything more than perpetrate the same status quo. if athletes can still test and go as the did in 2018. For how long do they have to be clean to pass tests and what benefits have already been gained even if they register clean for a couple of tests if they have undergone prolonged doping? What influential and unseen pressure and tactics could possibly be applied to ensure the desired results given the duplicitous and manipulative history, especially if in the wake of such a "ban" doping manipulation continues unabated? There must be a perceived overall advantage despite some setbacks to continuing the status quo. In many ways the duplicitous manipulation itself is a safeguard against accusation because anyone willing to follow the thread of deception to its greatest depth will be deemed a basher of Russia even though it is actually Russian sports authorities and those responsible for the policies that are tarnishing the image and potentianlly the long term health of its own athletes and scapegoating the messangers or whistleblowers who call them on their manipulation that jeopordizes and undermines fairness in interrnational competition.
 
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PRlady

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And that's not helping either.... Because instead of letting Russian entities find the guilty parties and take actions, it creates Nationalistic sentiment and all-russian belief that this is russophobia.

Well, of course, but you can't expect the media in other countries to say ho, hum, we won't do a story expressing our outrage because the Russians will get even worse.
 

Tinami Amori

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How are they going to do that if they were so invested in trying to tar the whistleblower? Who could trust that?
First, the "whistle blower" Rodchenkov was very aggressive against WADA and IOC, called western officials all sorts of profanities in public, and resisted in every way, when the scandal started in ~ 2013-2015.
He was the creator of the "doping plan" and his sister was the official smuggler of the illegal substances and distribution to Russian athletes. She was tried in 2013 for distribution of illegal drugs, by the Russian Federation, found guilty, was suppose to serve time, but bribed herself out of this. Her husband was her culprit and got out of this too.

From Russian wiki (google translates, and the info is softened for public reading).
В 2013 году была признана виновной и осуждена по статье ст. 234 ч. 3 УК РФ «незаконный оборот сильнодействующих или ядовитых веществ в целях сбыта». Суд первой инстанции приговорил её к полутора годам лишения свободы, но после кассационной жалобы срок заменили условным наказанием. Как гласят материалы уголовного дела, Марина Родченкова приобрела анаболические стероиды, активно используемые в профессиональном спорте: тестостерон-пропинат (общим весом 15 г), оксандролон (32,4 г) и метандиенон (10 г), которые, как пояснила сама Родченкова, она намеревалась в дальнейшем сбыть. Именно на этой попытке были задержаны её муж и предполагаемый покупатель товара — завербованный агент, бывший спортсмен А. И. Коновалов. При обыске у подследственной нашлись приготовленные для продажи вещества[3][4].

Russian side tried to do something about Rodchenkov, but he escaped to the "west" and became informer, not for sake of truth, but to save his but.

It is unfortunate that "western entities" overlooked his role in all of this, did not take actions against him, and made his into a "friend". But were correct to investigate the the issues.
 

misskarne

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And so Justin Gatlin will run in the Olympics and when he inevitably wins gold the US press will celebrate him, while in the same breath screaming bloody murder that innocent Russian athletes should have been banned altogether. The hypocrisy is astounding.

WADA continues to hunt Russia and yet China stands there unscathed and uninvestigated. Can you imagine if it had been a Russian swimmer with a positive test and RUSADA giving them a cutesy little 3-month ban that happened to coincide with off-season and never telling WADA? Talk about a nuclear fallout. And yet there was hardly a blink when China did it.

The ladies who are winning now were 9 and 10 years old during Sochi. They were (still are) children. Innocent children suffering from the consequences of what adults have done and that they had no part in. Well, it's very on-brand for the world in general, but you'll never get me to agree it's right.

I don't trust WADA as far as I could throw them. Ivan Bukin never got an explanation. I fully expect that sort of thing will happen again - a clean skater who's never had so much as a question mark over a test and wasn't in Sochi will be refused and WADA won't tell them why and give them no recourse. And then someone's Olympic dream will be stolen from them through no fault of their own, and they will be forced to sit home and watch convicted dopers compete for other countries.
 

PRlady

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Most whistle-blowers are complicit in what they're blowing the whistle on; that's how they know about it in the first place. Every western legal system has a provision of granting immunity to the folks turning state's evidence, from Mafia trials in the US to the many, many, MANY former close associates of Netanyahu now testifying against him (and responsible for the corruption indictments.) And every time, the defense points to the rat or whistle-blower and says, he was in it too, how can you trust him? (This is not true of Trump's whistle-blower but was true, for example, in the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. See the movie The Insider.)

So Rodchenkov might have been the chief rat but without him WADA wouldn't have the evidence it needed of actual wrongdoing, nobody was going to put him in jail.
 

Amantide

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It is a question of logistics. How do you get the samples from Russia to the European testing sites within the required 24 hour window?

That's not a problem at all. You can get about anything (organs etc.) within 24 hrs, if need be. But it's clear now that's not the issue. Thought it would've been great if they had done that.
 

RoseRed

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And so Justin Gatlin will run in the Olympics and when he inevitably wins gold the US press will celebrate him, while in the same breath screaming bloody murder that innocent Russian athletes should have been banned altogether. The hypocrisy is astounding.

WADA continues to hunt Russia and yet China stands there unscathed and uninvestigated. Can you imagine if it had been a Russian swimmer with a positive test and RUSADA giving them a cutesy little 3-month ban that happened to coincide with off-season and never telling WADA? Talk about a nuclear fallout. And yet there was hardly a blink when China did it.

The ladies who are winning now were 9 and 10 years old during Sochi. They were (still are) children. Innocent children suffering from the consequences of what adults have done and that they had no part in. Well, it's very on-brand for the world in general, but you'll never get me to agree it's right.

I don't trust WADA as far as I could throw them. Ivan Bukin never got an explanation. I fully expect that sort of thing will happen again - a clean skater who's never had so much as a question mark over a test and wasn't in Sochi will be refused and WADA won't tell them why and give them no recourse. And then someone's Olympic dream will be stolen from them through no fault of their own, and they will be forced to sit home and watch convicted dopers compete for other countries.
That was FINA though, not WADA, wasn't it? And WADA appealed to CAS over the most recent issue with him. So it's a false comparison.
 

MacMadame

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And so Justin Gatlin will run in the Olympics and when he inevitably wins gold the US press will celebrate him,
First of all, there is no inevitable in sports. Secondly, the US media is constantly bringing up the suspicion of doping when they write about Gatlin and it will be much worse now that the Nike Oregon Project has been disbanded and its head coach suspended.

Not to mention, deciding something that hasn't happened yet will happen a certain way and then accusing the people involved of bad things because of how they act in your imagined scenario is its own kind of hypocrisy IMO.
 

Tinami Amori

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Well, of course, but you can't expect the media in other countries to say ho, hum, we won't do a story expressing our outrage because the Russians will get even worse.
But the media is missing a point for sake of "sensation": WADA found Rusada in full compliance. The Head of Rusada, Ganus, gave a full explanation and admission to the manipulation, and a proof that the data was not in their control. The manipulation was done by a "renegade group" inside the organization not related to "sports" because the "data" was officially under the investigation. WADA reviewed and accepted the proof, and declared Rusada as a "no-fault" agency.



If the world's sports organizations' intent is to prevent doping and cheating, then the Russian Rusada and ROC should be allowed to fix the problem with the "other organization" and find the guilty parties and to punish them.

But with headings such as "Russians cheat - blanket ban" without addressing the details of the internal issues, it creates more resistance inside Russia to punish the guilty parties who are NOT part of the sport, and not "a Kremlin entities", but rather personally interested individuals.

There is an example with Boeing Co. Boeing Co. when any of their aircraft are sold, new or used, demand that the operating airlines buy a liability insurance which protects Boeing from any claims in case of accidents. If airlines don't comply, they receive no support (parts, maintenance schedules, wiring diagrams, engineering assistance, maintenance programmes, etc.).

Why? because whenever there is an accident involving Boeing aircraft, even if it is due to no fault of Boeing (drunk pilots, poor navigation, even weather conditions), the victim-parties still SUE BOEING (or any aircraft mfg in this position). Even when clearly the aircraft OEM is far detached from the operations of a particular airline/operator, they are still viewed as "big pockets" who can be slapped with a law-suite and will likely settle out of court in order to not have the name of their company in the head-lines. It's not just in airlines, but in big industry in general. Many believe it is not fair, including OEM's.

This is what pretty much is expected of "Russia", does not matter if Rusada and ROC are not guilty, it happened "in Russia" so take care of it. But in order to take care of it, Rusada and ROC needs time and leverage, and individual athletes certainly have no control and will NEVER have any control. Rusada has some control and should take care of it. But "evil Russia" headings don't help.
 

Andrey aka Pushkin

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Do we actually know for a fact that there was no explanation for individual athletes? I know that Bukin, for example, said there weren't but I also doubt they would have disclosed it if they were given a reason and I assume that Wada can't comment about issues of individuals as to not violate their privacy so they can't really refute those claims.
Yes, we do.
No explanation was given.
 

Sylvia

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Yuri Ganus, the head of Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA, has been one of the few critical voices inside Russia.
“The problem is that we have four years ahead of us and for now, judging by the reaction of the current sports authorities, I don’t see any prospect of resolving these issues,” Ganus told Reuters.
RUSADA is set to be stripped of its accreditation for the second time in four years as part of the same doping sanctions.
Ganus pointed to what he said was an unhealthy culture among Russia’s sporting authorities which he said was resistant to change. Officials had used destructive methods to handle a crisis that could have been resolved by honestly addressing issues, he said.
“I don’t think we need to... try to find those guilty in other countries and say that the main source of evil is the West or the East, or anyone else,” he said. “That’s nonsense. The main problem is our culture, the culture inside the sports world.”
Ganus said he hoped President Vladimir Putin, who has yet to comment on WADA’s recommendations to punish Russia, would order serious reform of the country’s sports administration.
“In our country with these traditions, autocratic and bureaucratic, the presidential level is needed to make decisions to change,” he said. “I really hope that the time has come for serious changes.”
Source was this Dec. 6th article that I posted in the Other Sports forum thread last night:
 

wickedwitch

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I don't trust WADA. Wile their purpose is great, they're too politically driven, and their ban first, ask questions later policy is unfair, IMO. What happened to Bobrova could have easily been avoided if they had done a smidgen of research. I also think what the Russian officials did was absurd. So I think this is a reasonable compromise, under the assumption that athletes like Bukin have a real opportunity to have their cases heard. The goal is to protect the innocent athlete. Banning innocent athletes does not help achieve that goal.

I would be all for Russian officials and judges getting banned, too.
 

Tinami Amori

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How do you know this?
Because Stolbova and Bukin sent many inquiries and never received a reply, and said so publicly. They also prepared a claim to CAS, but it was too late to send it before the Olympics 2018. It would cost them money, but even if decided in their favor would still not solve anything.

The Skating Federation was willing to send Stolbova and Bukin (the whole teams) to Korea to start preparing for the Olympics in case CAS decides in their favor, so then they can skate (because the Feds knew these two had no violations, if they did, there would be "another story"). But both skaters said they are not ready and too distracted, they will stay at home and get ready for Worlds (which they were allowed to skate in, BECAUSE there were no real violations).
 

Andrey aka Pushkin

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I am curious what -- if anything -- will happen to Alexander Lakernik, ISU First Vice President of Figure Skating. He's been smart and influential as figure skating has undergone changes this decade.
Nothing.
He's an ISU official, not a Russian official. For that matter, nothing happened to him the first time around either.

But the media is missing a point for sake of "sensation": WADA found Rusada in full compliance. The Head of Rusada, Ganus, gave a full explanation and admission to the manipulation, and a proof that the data was not in their control. The manipulation was done by a "renegade group" inside the organization not related to "sports" because the "data" was officially under the investigation. WADA reviewed and accepted the proof, and declared Rusada as a "no-fault" agency.

If the world's sports organizations' intent is to prevent doping and cheating, then the Russian Rusada and ROC should be allowed to fix the problem with the "other organization" and find the guilty parties and to punish them.

But with headings such as "Russians cheat - blanket ban" without addressing the details of the internal issues, it creates more resistance inside Russia to punish the guilty parties who are NOT part of the sport, and not "a Kremlin entities", but rather personally interested individuals.
While this is right in general, it's not exact either.

"Individuals" connected to the government are still "Kremlin entities", and for the matter of fact, we don't know for sure why they acted and whether it was a higher order. Personally I find your explanation plausible, but in that case I would expect some higher Russian official to get involved and indeed present this argument in the appeal, with the heads of those "individuals" attached as the exhibit. Starting another round of "it's all a conspiracy against The Wonderful Mother Russia" hysteria is counterproductive and doesn't help the cause either.

And WADA, as said, does what it can. It can't prosecute those "individuals", so it acts against who it can get, hoping to create the pressure on the "renegade group" connected to the political elites. And it actually might work. Additionally, the requirement now is for "Rusada's independence to be respected without improper outside interference with its operations". Which is easier said than done, but obviously aims at the right target.
 

maatTheViking

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How would you like to be the parent of an hysterical 15 or 16 year old who has never done anything wrong that somebody else just fecked with your life and career and did it when you were just a little kid?

I feel sorry for individual athletes who are clean. It’s unfortunate and seems unfair.

but I think for this to make an impact, you have to do a blanket ban. I’m not a huge fan of collective punishment, but it can be very effective.
If the teenagers grow up and are pissed and will vote for politicians who want to actually put an end to systematic doping - that will be the point where something will happen.

In addition, individual athletes of Russia are still Russian, and will be celebrated as such - flag or no flag. If there are no athletes to celebrate maybe finally we can arrive at a place where the systematic doping and systematic cheating on tests will end.

As for sending samples abroad - who will collect them? Who will handle them? WADA and the international staff were present at the Sochi facility, and Russia still managed to switch dirty samples with clean right under everyone’s noses.

Unfortunately in this case, it seems that punishing the perpetrators, which are really the Russian officials and not the athletes (even possibly the athletes who are not clean), is an impossibility.
 

angi

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From the athletes themselves.
Again, athletes stating they were given no reason doesn't mean that they actually weren't given any reason. Did we expect them to come out and say "they told me I'm suspended for failing a test after competition X" for example? It's pretty obvious it's not in their best interest to come out and say it. My point is that while the athletes said they were given no reason it doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
As for Bukin being banned from the Olympics and allowed to attend Worlds, I agree it's odd but assuming it was the same with other athletes in different sports it's not really saying much.
 

Primorskaya

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I would be all for Russian officials and judges getting banned, too.

I'd be for them (officials, not judges) getting banned first and foremost. That's the only case in which I'd support a blanket ban... Everyone allowing/participating in doping to happen, then trying for clumsy cover-ups, needs to get hit by some sort of punishment. Some judges should have received lifetime bans aeons ago, but by no means all of them. The athletes should come last on the list, knowing most of them have never put a foot wrong, and the ones who have, might have done so under pressure.
 

PRlady

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Source was this Dec. 6th article that I posted in the Other Sports forum thread last night:
So the head of RUSADA himself says there's a problem in the Russian sports world, a problem of culture, that in Russia's authoritative system can only be solved from the top down, i.e. by Putin. First of all, he's a brave man and :respec: from me. But it also says that the "corrupt individuals" theory is also flawed, if Ganus himself admits to a systemic problem.

Which is why I'm reluctantly in support of a ban of all the athletes, although it would kill me personally not to see the Russian skaters compete, I'm a fan of many of them. Losing the anthem and the flag is peanuts, it's only when some of the best in the world have to stay home will someone put the hammer down on the people cynically corrupting so many Russian sports. It's particularly heartbreaking in skating, where the window of accomplishment (for ladies, anyway) is so short and the skaters are so young; they are victimized by their own sports culture.
 

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