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RUSADA Says to Review Cases WADA Submitted After Moscow Lab Materials New Check in 2020

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia's anti-doping agency RUSADA will review the complaints against it by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) at the beginning of next year after it received 15 cases following re-examination of doping test data which WADA took issue with earlier this year, RUSADA Deputy Head Margarita Pakhnotskaya stated on Tuesday.
Sputnik
"These cases received from WADA will go on the next year because the December meeting is already fully occupied with the cases that were opened earlier", Pakhnotskaya said.

Pakhnotskaya explained that the full attention of the RUSADA and the disciplinary committee will be given to the cases early next year as the upcoming monthly meeting with the committee has already been fully occupied by other matters.

The statement comes after last week the WADA Executive Committee imposed a ban on Russian athletes, suspending them from participating in international sporting events, including world championships, the Olympic and Paralympic Games, for four years. WADA also declared RUSADA non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code.

RUSADA is still in the dark about the identities of the 145 athletes whose doping test data WADA took issue with and who served as the basis for the four-year ban as the process of analysing and verifying the years-old digital and biometric data is time-consuming.

RUSADA Says to Review Cases WADA Submitted After Moscow Lab Materials New Check in 2020

The sanctioned agency cannot as of yet verify whether the 15 cases it received are of those 145 of this list.

"Whether these cases are included in the notorious list of 145 athletes about whom there is no data in the transferred database, I do not know, because we do not have this list. WADA has a list of these names, but they don’t publish it", Pakhnotskaya elaborated.

The head of RUSADA, Yuri Ganus, confirmed the assumption that these 15 cases are the result of a study of biomaterials rather than electronic data.

"These are not the cases that are associated only with manipulations in the database. For the most part, this is just a study of bio-materials. This is largely a study of the LIMS [Laboratory Information Management System], of course. Because there is an interaction of those people who are involved in the problem. All the data is studied and so and so", he explained.
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