The founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency said the International Olympic Committee will have a tough time ignoring a recommendation to ban Russia from next month’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Dick Pound, WADA’s president from 1999 to 2007, told Global News he wasn’t surprised by the findings of a 97-page report released Monday, that detailed a Russian government doping cover-up scheme at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
WATCH: IOC to rule on banning Russia from Rio Games
What surprised him was the sheer volume of information Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren was able to uncover in his investigation.
READ MORE: How Russia pulled off state-sponsored cheating at the Olympics
“What they found was more than enough to establish the points,” Pound said in an interview from Montreal. And the results of that thorough investigation of hundreds of thousands of documents, he said, led WADA to come up with “unequivocal” recommendation that Russia should not be allowed to participate in Rio.
While McLaren’s report doesn’t make any penalty recommendations, WADA, which commissioned the commissioned the investigation, said the findings warrant a ban.
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“It’s could be pretty hard for the IOC to say, ‘Well, even though this comes from this particular group of stakeholders (that makes up WADA), we’re not going to follow it.”
McLaren’s report found at least 312 instances of drug test results being falsified between 2011 and 2015. The majority of those cases occurred in track and field and wrestling, but involved a total of 28 sports Olympic sports — from snowboarding to table tennis.
READ MORE: Who is Richard McLaren, author of the Russia doping report?
The IOC has promised the “toughest sanctions available” but hasn’t yet detailed how it would respond to the McLaren report or whether it would act on WADA’s recommendation to ban Russia.
Pound said prohibiting Russia from taking part in the Rio games wouldn’t hurt the competition, noting the absence of Russian athletes during the Eastern Bloc boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
If anything, he said, it would be a benefit to the sports and the athletes.
“Every time you find a cheater or a country that’s cheating, you’re helping the athletes that are clean,” he explained.
READ MORE: Canadian experts ‘repulsed,’ ‘disheartened’ by report’s findings
But that doesn’t mean all non-Russian athletes are clean Pound said but he believes the IOC taking such a serious action against one of its most prominent members would send a stark warning to smaller countries who may be cheating.
“To think Russia is the only country with a doping problem is pretty naive,” he said. “They’re going to look and say, ‘Whoa. If the IOC is prepared to do this to Russia… I better be careful.”
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