MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s athletics federation is cooperating with global athletics officials in a probe into allegations that some of its representatives forged documents in a doping case, it said on Sunday.
British newspaper The Sunday Times reported that forged medical documents were filed to the Athletics Integrity Unit, which probes doping cases in the sport, in order to provide an athlete with a medical excuse for having failed to declare his whereabouts last year.
The athlete, high jumper Danil Lysenko, had been one of the Russians cleared to compete internationally by the IAAF for having demonstrating he was training in a doping free-environment.
But he lost his status and was provisionally suspended in August, 2018 for having failed to provide his whereabouts.
“In the case of Lysenko, the Russian athletics federation is providing the Athletics Integrity Unit will full assistance,” federation president Dmitry Shlyakhtin said in a statement.
“The federation has an interest in the investigation being objective.”
The Russian athletics federation has been suspended since a 2015 report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report that found evidence of widespread doping in the sport.
IAAF will consider whether to lift the ban against Russia at its Council meeting in Monaco next week.
Russian authorities have denied their doping program was state-sponsored but have accepted that senior officials were involved in providing banned substances to athletes, interfering with anti-doping procedures or covering up positive tests.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, editing by Ed Osmond)
