Russia facing IAAF suspension by Friday over damning doping report

Russia faces being suspended from athletics by the end of the week as the fallout from Dick Pound’s devastating report into state-sponsored doping begins to reverberate around world sport.

Sebastian Coe, the head of the sport’s global governing body who is under pressure to act in the wake of the damning report that also alleged “corruption and bribery practices at the very highest level of international athletics”, will chair a meeting of the International Association of Athletics Federations council on Friday at which sanctions against Russia will be decided.

It is understood that senior figures within theIAAF council will push for Russia to be immediately provisionally suspended. Russia has until Thursday to respond to the allegations of cover-ups, destruction of samples and payment of money to conceal positive doping tests contained within Pound’s report.

Lord Coe is also expected to come under renewed pressure to give up his advisory role with the sportswear company Nike as he battles to save his sport’s reputation. The Conservative MP Damian Collins, who will be among those on the culture, media and sport select committee who will question Coe before Christmas, said he should drop his association with the company.

“I am going to ask him about that. If athletics is going to have a new clean image it can’t be right for the president of the IAAF to be sponsored by Nike. Seb Coe should give up his role as a Nike ambassador,” said Collins. “We are also going to ask about the process of how the IAAF has handled this doping scandal.”

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Wada, meanwhile, has revoked the accreditation of the Moscow laboratory said to be at the centre of the systemic doping programme, meaning that all samples will now be tested outside Russia.

Hours later, the lab director Grigory Rodchenkov resigned, according to the state news agency Tass. Rodchenkov, who had railed against the report’s findings, was accused of destroying 1,417 samples before Wada officials visited in December last year.

Rodchenkov was specifically identified in the report as an “aider and abettor” of the doping activities and it was recommended he should be “permanently removed from his position”.

Wada will meet next week in Colorado Springs to decide on its next move. Coe had previously said on Sunday, before the report was released, that he was minded to encourage rehabilitation from within but would “never say never” when it came to suspension. Yet it now looks increasingly likely that Russia will be provisionally suspended from all competition at the end of this week.

Under the process that would follow, Russia would be given the opportunity for a full hearing and a final verdict would follow around a month later. If it was decided that Russia should be formally suspended, as recommended by Pound’s report, they would not be readmitted to the sport until they had proved they were compliant with Wada’s code.

If Russia engaged with the process then it is possible it could be readmitted within months. Asked whether Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister judged “complicit” in the state-sponsored doping system, could be trusted to clean it up, Pound said if they were caught again the country would become a pariah.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. At that point you get the stick out and say: ‘I’m sorry. We identified this. You undertook to fix it. You said you’d fixed it. We found out you haven’t fixed it. You’re out.’ And that might apply across more sports than track and field,” he said.

There were mixed messages from Moscow, with the sports ministry saying most of the findings came as little surprise and promising to consider the report and other officials immediately hitting out at what was described as a politically motivated plot.

“As long as there is no evidence it is difficult to consider the accusations which appear rather unfounded,” said Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The Russian athletics federation said the head coach, Yuri Borzakovsky, would meet Putin in Sochi on Wednesday. Pound’s 325-page report said that both the Sochi lab and the one in Moscow were infiltrated by Russian secret service agents.

But the International Olympic Committee, which conducted a two-hour conference call to discuss the crisis on Tuesday, said it had no concerns over the operation of the lab during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

The IOC confirmed that the former IAAF president Lamine Diack, who resigned as president of the International Athletics Foundation on Tuesday night – the only formal position he still held at the IAAF – and was arrested by French police last week investigating corruption allegations linked to covering up positive Russian tests, had been provisionally suspended from his honorary role. It also promised to reallocate medals where required.

“The IOC has asked the IAAF to initiate disciplinary procedures against all athletes, coaches and officials who have participated in the Olympic Games and are accused of doping in the report of the Independent Commission,” it said.

“With its zero-tolerance policy against doping, following the conclusion of this procedure, the IOC will take all the necessary measures and sanctions with regard to the withdrawal and reallocation of medals and as the case may be exclusion of coaches and officials from future Olympic Games.”