(Reuters) -Global sport’s top arbitration court gave Russian high jumper Danil Lysenko a six-year ban on Monday for anti-doping charges, ruling him out of the Tokyo Olympics starting this month.
Lysenko, 24, had been provisionally suspended since 2018 for failure to provide his location and tampering with the test results management process.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) sanctioned him for two years for the whereabouts breaches and four for tampering.
However, two years were suspended due to his help to the global Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), enabling charges against ex-Russian Athletics Federation (RusAF) officials Dmitry Shlyakhtin and Artur Karamyan.
As well as the Tokyo Games, Lysenko will miss next year’s World Athletics Championships in Eugene because of the ban, which is due to end on Aug. 3, 2022.
Russian athletes are barred from competing at major international events, including the Olympics, with their flag and anthem until 2022. The country will compete in Tokyo under the name “ROC”, for the Russian Olympic Committee.
Many Russian athletes were sidelined from the past two Olympics, and the country’s flag was banned at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games as punishment for state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Sochi Games.
Russia has in the past acknowledged some shortcomings in its implementation of anti-doping policies, but it denies running a state-sponsored doping programme.
Lysenko, who won silver at the 2017 world championships, failed to file his whereabouts three times, bringing a provisional suspension under the three strikes rule.
In 2019, the AIU concluded that Russian federation officials had provided false explanations and forged documents to try and explain Lysenko’s whereabouts failures.
In February, five former officials, including former RusAF president Shlyakhtin, were banned for four years after a disciplinary tribunal upheld all charges against them in the investigation into Lysenko.
(Reporting by Hardik Vyas and Shrivathsa Sridhar in Bengaluru;Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
