Russian scandal clouds WADA summit
Twenty years after its formation, the world anti-doping agency WADA meets for its fifth world conference in the Polish city of Katowice from Tuesday to Thursday. Officially, the business of the meeting is to adopt a new anti-doping code and to elect a new president.
However, it is the long-running saga over Russian state-backed doping and institutionalised cheating which will dominate proceedings. AFP Sport looks at the business in hand in Poland.
It's the scandal which refuses to die but the burning issue over potential new sanctions for Russia is not even on the agenda of WADA's executive committee on Monday and Thursday in Poland.
The affair, which has dominated the global anti-doping fight -- as well as creating splits in how to deal with it -- for the past five years, reappeared in September due to suspicions of manipulation of the electronic data from the former Moscow laboratory handed over to WADA investigators in early 2019.
The new revelations could lead to new sanctions such as a ban from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as the fight against doping is ramped up after Russia was already found guilty of state-sponsored cheating between 2011 and 2015.
Russia's Athletics Federation has been banned from international competition since 2015.
