After a three hours IAAF council, to decide the sanction for the Russian Athletics Federation after the doping scandal, the silence is finally broken.
The council dediced, for the first time in history, to provisionally suspend the Russian Federation from all international competitions. Russia now risk not to compete at the next World Championship and Olympics.
22 members of the council voted in favour of the sanction and only 1 against it.
“Today we have been dealing with the failure of ARAF and made the decision to provisionally suspend them, the toughest sanction we can apply at this time” – this is Sebastian Coe‘s comment – “But we discussed and agreed that the whole system has failed the athletes, not just in Russia, but around the world. This has been a shameful wake up call and we are clear that cheating at any level will not be tolerated”.
Moreover Russia will not host the World Race Walking Cup and the World Junior Championships and all the present and future doping cases will be conducted to CAS.
All the russian athletes at the moment can partecipate in domestic competition but this will not remove the obligation to comply with the IAAF Anti-Doping Rules, including continuing being subject to out of competition testing.
Unless ARAF voluntarily accepts a full suspension, the IAAF could decide to convert the provisionally sunspention in a full suspension. To regain membership to the IAAF the ARAF will have to fulfill a list of criteria that will be decided in the netx few days.
Photo Nikolay Kondakov