The World Anti-Doping Agency could suspend Russia from competitions for four years

[Inkriql]

The general director of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), Yuri Ganus, said Monday that the World Anti-Doping Agency intends to impose "serious sanctions" on Russian sport.

"The final list of sanctions will be known on December 9 and these, in any case, will be quite serious," Ganus told Tass.

The World Anti-Doping Agency will meet that day in Paris to examine the ongoing process against the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.

On September 23, the AMA announced an investigation due to doubts about the authenticity of the data collected at the Moscow Laboratory, alluding to a possible mani[CENSORED]tion of the doping tests, and gave Russia three weeks to respond to these allegations.

Russia sent a letter to WADA on October 8 with clarifications to 31 points that the international organization had put on the table.

However, according to some information, Russia would have provided the AMA with an incomplete report and had only answered 23 questions.

The RUSADA was suspended four years ago between accusations of state doping, which conditioned the participation of Russian athletes in the Rio 2016 Games, and after its rehabilitation with conditions in September 2018, the AMA had access to the samples preserved in the Russian laboratory to reexamine those that aroused suspicion.

If the current suspicions of the AMA are confirmed, Russia could be excluded from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, as well as the Winter games that will be held in Beijing in 2022.

Russian athletes, however, will be able to compete as they did during the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang under a neutral flag. With it, athletes will not represent their country or sing their anthem if they get the medal. This background in South Korea came after WADA has reported a thousand cases of doping in various sports mostly during the Winter Games in Sochi (2014).

For his part, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, called not to draw hasty conclusions and wait for "concrete results" from the investigation of the global anti-doping authorities.

"The Russian sports authorities are in contact with the global sports community and the AMA," he said quoted by RIA Nóvosti.