IAAF STATEMENT CONCERNING CAS DECISIONS: SIX RUSSIAN ATHLETES

The IAAF is grateful to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for the decisions it published today upholding the IAAF’s appeals concerning the cases of six international-level Russian athletes: Olga Kaniskina, Yuliya Zaripova, Sergey Bakulin, Valeriy Borchin, Vladimir Kanaykin and Sergey Kirdyapkin.

The IAAF will immediately proceed to the effective disqualification of results, re-rankings and reallocation of medals in all competitions under its control. With respect to the Olympic Games, the IAAF will inform the International Olympic Committee of the CAS decisions and request the disqualification of results and the reallocation of medals.

Summary

All six athletes had initially been charged by the IAAF following abnormalities in their Athlete Biological Passport’s profile. They had all been found guilty of a doping offence and all received an increased period of ineligibility imposed by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA). However, the IAAF considered that RUSADA had been too “selective” as regards the results to be disqualified retroactively as a consequence of the doping offence revealed by the Athlete Biological Passport and that actually more results should have been disqualified.

The IAAF considered this as an important point of principal in the context of the Athlete Biological Passport and is pleased to see that the CAS Panel has taken the strongest possible line and made a strict and full application of IAAF Rules, in the interest of clean athletes and sport justice.

ROBUST IAAF ANTI-DOPING PROGRAMME – ZARIPOVA AND CHERNOVA

The disciplinary cases concerning the anti-doping rule violations of Tatiana Chernova and Yulia Zaripova, notified by RUSADA at the end of last week, are the latest illustration of the robustness of the IAAF anti-doping programme.

The case of Yulia Zaripova was based upon irregularities in her Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) profile constituted and built-up by the IAAF in the framework of its doping control programme.

This was the same for the five Russian race walkers whose sanctions were also announced by RUSADA a fortnight ago.

More than 40 elite athletes have now been sanctioned on the basis of abnormal ABP profiles from the IAAF testing programme.

Tatiana Chernova tested positive as a result of a re-analysis ordered by the IAAF of her sample collected at the 2009 IAAF World Championships in Berlin.

The IAAF has systematically been re-testing samples from major championships, notably with five athletes sanctioned – and one case still pending – after the retesting in 2013 of samples taken from the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki.

Samples collected by the IAAF in-competition and out-of-competition are transferred to the WADA accredited laboratory in Lausanne for long term storage in accordance with the IAAF retesting policy.

Lamine Diack, IAAF President, credit IAAF

As IAAF President Lamine Diack commented at the time of those Helsinki re-tests, “The IAAF’s message to cheaters is increasingly clear that there is no place to hide”.