MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Monday that Russia had three weeks to respond to concerns raised by the World Anti-Doping Agency over the alleged manipulation of Russian anti-doping laboratory data.
WADA said earlier on Monday it was looking to determine whether Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA was compliant with international anti-doping regulations after it found inconsistencies in Moscow’s laboratory data.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin was aware of the issue, but that it was a matter for the country’s sports authorities.
“We know that WADA has a series of questions,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call. “A three-week deadline has been set to answer these questions, so we just need to wait for a three-week period.”
RUSADA was reinstated by WADA last year after the Russian agency served a suspension of nearly three years over evidence of mass doping in Russian athletics.
Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov said the ministry would cooperate with WADA in determining what was wrong with the data.
“We were told that the database submitted to WADA is slightly different that from the copy that WADA experts took in Moscow in 2019,” Kolobkov said in a statement. “Experts in the field of digital technology from both sides will determine what these discrepancies are and what they are linked to.”
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Tom Balmforth; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Christian Radnedge)
