ASADA boss wants Russia banned from Olympics if they deleted doping tests

Australia’s anti-doping boss has lit an Olympic fuse, declaring Russia should be thrown out of the Tokyo Games if it’s found to have deliberately erased positive drug tests.

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Update: The glare of the entire sporting world is bearing down on Russia once again.

For the second time in three years, Russia is embroiled in another drug-cheating scandal which includes the brazen attemptto erase positive drug tests under the nose of authorities.

Such is the global significance of the bombshell claims, the boss of Australia’s Anti-Doping Agency David Sharpe wants Russia banned from the Tokyo Olympics next year, if it’s proven they have cheated the system yet again.

The World Anti-Doping Agency had given the embattled nation three weeks to explain how a number of positive drug tests were deleted from a database sent to the world’s anti-doping regulator during the same period it investigated Russia for one of the biggest cheating scandals in international sport history.

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Russia is under pressure to keep its standing as an Olympic nation. Picture: AFP

Russia’s promise to deliver a database of thousands of athlete records was a key factor in WADA’s decision to lift a ban onthe country’s anti-doping agency in late 2018.

However, a WADA investigative team had found inconsistencies between a data set passed to it by a whistle-blower in 2017 andthe tests extracted from the Moscow laboratory in January.

The spotlight on Russia has emerged in the wake of a three-year suspension that had been imposed after the discovery of one of the most audacious and sophisticated cheating schemes in history, one that corrupted a number of major international sporting events, including several Olympics.

The scandal meant Russian athletes were barred from competing under their own flag at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

ASADA boss David Sharpe in Canberra. Picture: Gary Ramage

“It’s critical that this issue be dealt with and be dealt with swiftly in order to protect the integrity of doping globally,’’ Sharpe told The Daily Telegraph.

“We’ve got the original issue of systemic doping and that was managed with certain conditions that needed to be met (by Russia).

“They were reinstated on the basis of those conditions were met.

“But if one of those conditions, has been manipulated, which is has been suggested, if that evidence is there, I would suggest it would need to be the hardest response and that’s removal from the Olympics.

“I would support the strongest actions of WADA coming down on them.’’

Sharpe said it was imperative WADA showed the rest of the sporting world they were serious about drug cheats.

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“If you put it in context of how all the high-profile individual cases Australia has had this year that aren’t systemic doping, you look at how we treat doping and how seriously we take it and the sanctions we hand out, well my view is, systemic dopingneeds to be treated with the highest priority,’’ Sharpe said.

“The majority of countries are treating individual doping cases very seriously and sanctioning athletes, so if it’s systemic, you’d lose confidence in the anti-doping system if you don’t deal with that, if the evidence exists.

“What always plays on my mind and on ASADA’s mind is, if we hold our own athletes and our own sporting bodies to such high account, we need to work collectively as a global anti-doping community to ensure the world is held to the same account as our own countries.

“You lose confidence in anti-doping programs globally if others are held to account to different standards to what we hold our own to account.’’

The allegations and WADA’s response has ensured the countdown to the 2020 Tokyo games will be similar to that of the 2016 Rio Olympics, where a WADA proposal to ban Russia from participating was overturned at the 11th hour by the International Olympic Committee.

However, of the latest scandal, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Stanislav Pozdnyakov, said in a statement to The Associated Press: “The situation is very serious.

“The Russian Olympic team’s prospects of taking part in the Games in Tokyo next year could be under threat.”

A determination from WADA on their findings into Russia’s latest scandal isn’t expected until the end of November.

Originally published as ASADA boss wants Russia banned from Olympics if they deleted doping tests