The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirmed that it has not appealed the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) sanction on the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) on Tuesday, despite being “disappointed” with some of the decisions from the CAS Panel.
WADA imposed a four-year ban on RUSADA back in December of 2019, declaring that the organization was non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code. Following RUSADA‘s appeal, the CAS reduced Russia’s international sports ban from four years down to two.
Just last week, RUSADA released a statement on the decision, saying that while it didn’t entirely agree with the CAS decision (wanting it to be completely eliminated), they would not appeal the decision.
Now, WADA is following suit, though it had hoped the ban would be bumped back up to four years, and were not in agreeance with the panel on everything.
“WADA was disappointed that the CAS Panel, based on its own assessment of proportionality, decided not to impose all the consequences that WADA sought (and not for the full four-year period),” the agency said in a press release.
“However, the grounds of appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal are limited to procedural matters such as jurisdiction, the composition of the Panel and the right to be heard. The Swiss Federal Tribunal does not conduct a review of the merits and would therefore not interfere with the Panel’s assessment of the proportionality of the consequences.
“As a result, and following unanimous advice from in-house and external legal counsels, WADA strongly believes an appeal would have served no useful purpose and decided to refrain from doing so.”
Despite feeling as though an appeal wouldn’t be useful, it is worth noting that we’ve seen a few high profile appeals return to the Swiss Federal Tribunal and CAS, including Sun Yang‘s eight-year doping ban.
