After months of speculation and investigations regarding allegations of systematic doping involving Russian athletes, the World Anti-Doping Agency today released a report calling for the Russian Athletics Federation to be suspended from competition.
Today's events have cast a shadow over track and field which has grappled with its fair share of doping scandal and as Nick Harris of the Mail of Sunday and SportingIntelligence.com said on Off The Ball tonight, "When you actually see [World Anti-Doping Agency commission chairperson] Dick Pound's very extensive, 325 page report in black and white, basically corroborating and confirming independent, highly skilled lawyers and investigators, confirming and corroborating officialy everything we'd reported, you do think 'Oh my goodness, it is every bit as bad as we said it was'. I'm not shocked because we knew, we were told this was happening".
But Harris added that he was shocked to an extent at the scale of the scandal and cover-up, and also welcomed the recommendations made in the WADA report. He also touched on the revelations of Russian Secret Service interference with samples.
"I am shocked at that - the Secret Service. We had no sniff of that, that the Russian Secret Service had penetrated the lab during the Winter Olympics. I had no inkling that had happened. That was something that shocked me," said Harris, before discussing other aspects of the scandal including the role of the International Association of Athletics Federations.
"The most serious questions here are clearly for the Russian government, Russian anti-doping authorities and Russian athletics authorities. The IAAF as an institution have behaved absolutely shockingly throughout this whole process," he added, before scrutinising the position of IAAF president Seb Coe.
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