IOC President Thomas Bach proposed an overhaul of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s operations on Friday, including the creation of independent testing and professional intelligence-gathering units to avoid the type of scandals that have embroiled Russia and track and field.
In a radical change, Bach also recommended that all doping sanctions be handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, rather than by individual sports bodies or WADA.
Bach also said that Russia’s Olympic chief briefed him on “important first steps” that have been taken to reform country’s anti-doping program following the suspension of its track and field federation.
Bach spoke in a keynote address at the opening in Prague of the general assembly of the European Olympic Committees.
Bach laid out three proposals for WADA to consider, in order to ensure a “streamlined, efficient and worldwide harmonised anti-doping system”:
· Setting up a testing and results management unit within WADA that is independent of the agency’s monitoring role. Sports federations would transfer their anti-doping systems to the new body and make funding available. Governments would support the new organisation “both logistically and financially.”
· Establishing a “professional intelligence-gathering unit” within new doping body. The unit would deal with compliance by national anti-doping bodies and drug-testing labs accredited by WADA. This would help to make them “compliant at all times and in such a way to protect the clean athletes worldwide to the same level.”
· Doping bans and other sanctions to be imposed only by CAS, the Swiss-based arbitration court that currently rules on appeals of doping and other cases. Bach said the change would make the process more cost efficient and harmonised across allsports and countries. The right to appeal against sanctions to a different CAS panel “would be fully upheld and guaranteed.”
In the meantime, Bach said WADA would lead an intelligence-gathering program funded by the IOC to make drug-testing as independent as possible in the lead-up to next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Meanwhile, Russia’s athletics federation says three athletes have been found in breach of its suspension from international track and field.
In a statement on Russian athletics federation website, general secretary Mikhail Butov said the IAAF notified the federation of three cases in which Russians have “taken part in marathons and races on November 14 and 15” in violation of the suspension.
One of three is believed to be Viktor Ugarov, who won Kanazawa marathon in Japan on Sunday, two days after suspension was announced, and was later disqualified. The identities of the other two were not immediately clear.