Radcliffe Backs Banned Russian Petition

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Paula Radcliffe is backing a petition that wants Russia's athletes banned from competition until money won by their drug cheats since 2009 is repaid.

It has been signed by the former world marathon champion and a number of other athletes, agents and promoters.

They believe the money belongs to sportsmen and women "whose earnings were reduced by cheating athletes".

Russia is suspended from international athletics because of widespread cheating and corruption.

It hopes to get the ban lifted in time for the 2016 Olympics, which begin in Rio de Janeiro on 5 August.

The online petition, which went live on Tuesday, had attracted 149 signatures by 14:00 GMT on Thursday.

Among them are marathon world record holder Radcliffe, Olympic heptathlon bronze medallist Kelly Sotherton, London Marathon chief executive Nick Bitel and Berlin Marathon race director Mark Milde.

Kenya's Edna Kiplagat, the 2011 and 2013 world marathon champion and Germany's Irina Mikitenko, who won the London Marathon in 2008, have also signed it.

"It's an extremely good idea," Bitel told the BBC's World Service. "There are many, many athletes around the world who've been affected.

"To try to leave it up to individual athletes and individual events to sue the Russian athletes who doped, that is just not practical."

Russia's Liliya Shobukhova won the London Marathon in 2010 and claimed a hat-trick of Chicago titles before being stripped of those victories for doping irregularities.

Bitel says he is determined to recover the money Shobukhova won by winning in London.

"Our intention is that someone who cheats shouldn't get away with it, but we have started the process and will pursue her so far as we can," he said.

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Coe Ready to Ban Kenya from Rio

Sebastian Coe is ready to ban Kenya’s track and field team from the Olympic Games in Rio if the country’s athletics federation is declared non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Agency code.

Kenya last week missed a deadline to prove to Wada it was doing enough to combat doping and the IAAF president has confirmed he will impose serious sanctions on any nation guilty of attempting to cover up drug-taking.

“We know a disproportionate amount of reputational damage is caused by a relatively few countries and we have to be much more proactive,” Lord Coe told BT Sport’s The Clare Balding Show. “Yes, if it means pulling them out of world championships or Olympic Games then we will have to do that.

“I know the World Anti-Doping Agency has looked very closely at the Kenyan National Anti-Doping Agency. We, of course, monitor that through the IAAF, so that work is ongoing.”

Russia, banned from athletics in November after being found guilty of state-sponsored doping, aims to prove it has changed its ways before Rio. The scandal has engulfed the whole sport of athletics, with Coe admitting his reputation may now be on the line.

“When you look at the horror show that has unfolded in the last six months, year or so, the question we all have to ask ourselves – and I’m not immune from that, I ask myself this every day – is how on earth did we get to this position?

“The guiding principle for me is to get the right people with the right motives in the sport, and by a distance they are there. We’ve just got to elevate them now.”

Nestlé and Adidas have attempted to sever their sponsorship ties with the IAAF, which has vowed to keep the companies on board.

“They want to know what changes I am prepared to make,” Coe said. “Am I serious about that? Yes, I am. Is it the only thing I’m focused on? Yes. Will we get those in place as quickly as we can? Yes, we will. But they have boards of shareholders, they have corporate governances themselves, so they are asking the right questions and a large part of my waking hours is flying around the world explaining to them why it is my intention to never return to this again.”

Wilson Kipsang has urged Kenya’s government to fend off the threat of an Olympics ban by bolstering the fight against doping. The president of the Professional Athletes Association of Kenya was among 80 athletes who met in Eldoret on Wednesday to formulate an appeal to Kenya’s government to fast-track legislation criminalising doping.

“If we are banned, Kenya will never be the same again,” the former marathon world record holder said. “This is a country which has made its name as an athletics giant. We have done well in the Olympic and world championships and therefore, we should not miss out complying with the doping directives.

“Since the formation of Adak [the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya], the agency has never been formalised and most importantly given powers to deal with doping. It also needs legislative will from government.”

Kip Keino, the former Olympic gold medallist who heads Kenya’s Olympic committee, echoed Kipsang’s sentiments.

“It is for the government to act and see what they can do regarding this matter,” he said. “This is the IAAF ethics commission’s work. They reckon we are too slow. We will do our best. We will put our heads together with the government and Adak and AK [Athletics Kenya]. But government must do the donkey work. It must take the draft bill to cabinet and be enacted. We are too slow.”

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Records Reset Pointless - Bolt

Six-times Olympic champion Usain Bolt says he feels shocked and let down by the scandal-hit IAAF. But the Jamaican sprinter is against resetting athletics world records as the sport attempts to move on from the doping crisis.

Thursday’s second instalment of a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report criticised the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), accusing its former head, Lamine Diack, of running a clique that covered up organised doping and blackmailed athletes as senior officials looked the other way. The first part of the report by independent investigator Dick Pound, a former head of Wada, in November led to athletics superpower Russia being banned from competition for state-sponsored doping.

Jamaican sprint king Bolt, the biggest name in athletics with a plethora of titles, records and commercial deals, said the IAAF had failed their athletes. “When I heard it was quite shocking for me to hear that because as far as I was concerned I think they were doing a good job to clean up the sport,” Bolt told Reuters in Kingston after collecting his sixth National Sportsman of the year award. “So for me to hear something like this was quite shocking and you feel let down as an athlete to be wanting to actually help clean up the sport, and then something like this to come up about the body. It’s kind of a letdown, so hopefully there’s no such thing, but we’ll see what happens.”

Diack stepped down last year after 16 years leading the IAAF and was replaced by Sebastian Coe. The Senegalese is already under formal investigation in France on suspicion of corruption and money laundering linked to the concealment of positive drug tests in concert with Russian officials and the blackmailing of the athletes to allow them to continue to compete. The reports noted that Diack “sanctioned and appeared to have had personal knowledge of the fraud and the extortion of athletes carried out by the actions of the illegitimate governance structure he put in place”.

UK Athletics (UKA) released “A Manifesto for Clean Athletics” on Monday, calling for world records to be wiped clean and drug cheats to be banned for at least eight years in radical proposals aimed at heralding in a new era for the sport. The 29-year-old Bolt, who set the 100m and 200m world records of 9.58 and 19.19 seconds in 2009 and shared in the 4x100m mark of 36.84secs in 2012, is against the proposal.

“As far as I’m concerned it’s really pointless,” he said. “What’s done is done, you have to just move forward and try to make the upcoming championships and Olympics and the next [world] records as best as we can and just look forward to the future. You can’t worry about the past, but try to build on the future.”

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Top Managers of Rusada Step Down

All the top managers of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) have stepped down, the R-Sport news agency reported on Thursday, in the latest steps to clean up Russian athletics to avoid missing next year’s Olympics.

Russia was suspended from international athletics last month after a special commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency exposed widespread state-sponsored cheating and corruption. It is working to lift the ban in time for its athletes to compete at the Rio Games next August.

“It was decided at a meeting attended by the heads of Rusada that the general director, Ramil Khabriev, should be relieved of his position,” R-Sport quoted Natalia Zhelanova, an adviser to the sports minister, as saying.

She said “all the high-level management” of the agency was stepping down.

Anna Antseliovich, head of Rusada’s Result Management and Investigation Department, has been named as the acting general director of the organisation.

Since Soviet times, Russia has invested heavily to ensure success at the Olympic Games and earn itself the status of sporting superpower, so banishment from Rio would be a severe blow to its prestige.

The sport’s world governing body, the IAAF, said last week that Russia could only be reinstated to international competition if it complied with a detailed ‘roadmap’.

Among the requirements were that Russia demonstrate that none of its sporting officials have any prior links to doping, and that Rusada should be able to operate “effectively and without interference”.

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia was against doping in sport, and people who used it must be punished.

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Russian Agency Not Being Disbanded

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency will not be disbanded despite the scandal surrounding the systematic doping of Russian athletes, the country’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, said on Monday.

Rusada was heavily criticised in the independent commission report put together by Dick Pound on behalf of World Anti-Doping Agency earlier this month and was suspended after being declared “non-compliant with immediate effect” at a Wada meeting in Colorado.

The scandal has led to all Russian athletes being banned indefinitely by IAAF, a decision Russia decided last week to accept alongside the promise to cooperate with inspectors who will oversee changes to its drug-testing system. However, Mutko has insisted that it’s own testing authority will not be shut down.

“No doubt, Rusada will remain as an organisation,” he is quoted as saying by the Russian news agency, Tass. “We have started working [jointly with Wada].”

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Radcliffe Reacts to Jesse Norman

Paula Radcliffe has "categorically" denied any form of cheating in a statement following questions raised during a parliamentary select committee "effectively implicated" her in the Sunday Times' allegations of blood doping in athletics.

Jesse Norman MP suggested winners and medallists at the London Marathon and "potentially British athletes" were under suspicion.

Radcliffe was not specifically named.

But she is a three-time London Marathon winner and the only British athlete since 1996 to triumph at the event.

Following the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing, she issued a statement saying she was "devastated" her name had been "linked to these wide-ranging accusations".

The Sunday Times published data from 5,000 athletes, which it had reviewed by scientists and said revealed an "extraordinary extent of cheating".

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) called the allegations "sensationalist and confusing" and denied it had failed in its duty to carry out effective blood testing.

Radcliffe said she had the "greatest respect" for people "responsibly trying to uncover cheating", but added she was "profoundly disappointed that the cloak of parliamentary privilege" had been used to tarnish her reputation, without recourse.

She said: "I have campaigned long and hard throughout my career for a clean sport. I have publicly condemned cheats and those who aid them. These accusations threaten to undermine all I have stood and competed for, as well as my hard-earned reputation.

"By linking me to allegations of cheating, damage done to my name and reputation can never be fully repaired, no matter how untrue I know them to be."

Radcliffe, who also won the New York Marathon three times and the Chicago Marathon, retired from competitive athletics this year following a persistent foot injury.

She said she "wrestled long and hard with a desire to speak out" following the initial publication of the joint Sunday Times and ARD/WDR investigation of 12,000 blood tests from 5,000 athletes between 2001 and 2012.

She said she had wanted to "fully explain any fluctuations" in her blood data, but was advised she would risk her name being connected with "false allegations".

"As a result of today's parliamentary hearing I can no longer maintain my silence," she added.

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Terzi Takes Action in Turkey

The Turkish Athletics Federation has given two-year suspensions to 31 athletes for drug offences, including Olympic medallist Esref Apak.

Hammer thrower Apak, who won silver in Athens in 2004, was one of three athletes listed who competed at the 2012 London Olympics.

Turkey's doping problems threaten to affect Istanbul's bid to host the 2020 Olympics.

International Olympic Committee members will choose a winner on 7 September.

Worse could follow for the sport in Turkey when TAF completes its investigations into alleged doping by Asli Cakir Alptekin, thewomen's 1,500-metre gold medallist at the 2012 Olympics, and two other female team members in London last year.

The bans were expected after the International Association of Athletics Federations carried out tests before and during the Mediterranean Games in the Turkish city of Mersin in June.

Apak was one of eight athletes who tested positive following the European Team Championships in Gateshead the same month.

Last week, TAF chairman Mehmet Terzi resigned from the post he had held for nine years in the face of doping allegations directed at Turkish sportsmen and women.

"The athletes were found to be in violation of Turkey's strict anti-doping laws following testing undertaken by the Turkish anti-doping authority (TADA)," Ugur Erderner, president of Turkey's National Olympic Committee and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) executive board, said in a statement.

"This work is part of a concerted, and much more aggressive, anti-doping policy in Turkey that has been in place for over six months and will be further reinforced with the re-accreditation of the Wada-licensed anti-doping laboratory in Ankara later this year."

The TAF listed the names of the suspended athletes on its website, without giving details of their offences.

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