Russia will tighten the responsibility for doping abuse by athletes, with law enforcers to be empowered to investigate such cases, according to President Vladimir Putin. “The responsibility (for doping abuse) must be tightened,” Putin said after discussing the issue with the government last week. “We’ve made a decision to support amendments to tighten legislation: to enhance responsibility and to adopt legislation allowing the use of detective and policing methods to let our law enforcers use investigative methods to expose the use and proliferation of doping substances,” Putin said, adding he hoped a future State Duma would support the amendments.
Commenting on the situation around accusations of doping abuse by Russian athletes, Putin noted that Russia is thankful to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and promised to study its information on doping among Russian athletes attentively. “We should be thankful to our counterparts from WADA and should treat the information they’ve provided in a most serious way,” he said, insisting that Russia has always fought with doping at state level and will continue doing it. “We hope the information we’ll be receiving ourselves or will be getting otherwise will be unbiased,” Putin said adding
this is the sphere where conclusions should not be made on the basis of rumors or simply suspicions.
“We must get facts,” he said. In his words, Russia’s prosecutor general’s office and the
Investigations Committee conduct corresponding checks and taking efforts to receive such facts. “It is inadmissible to rely on the words of people who say it was them to commit violations and spread doping,” Putin stressed. “It is them who are violators and who are responsible for this situation.”
This story first appeared in the blog, The Sport Intern. The editor is Karl-Heinz Huba of Lorsch, Germany. He can be reached at ISMG@aol.com. The article is reprinted here with permission of Huba.