Court bans 7 Russians who tampered with dope tests

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Sport’s highest court extended doping bans until April 2011 for seven Russian athletes who tampered with urine samples, ensuring they will miss next month’s world championships in Berlin.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the IAAF’s appeal for longer suspensions for middle-distance runners Olga Yegorova, Tatyana Tomashova, Yelena Soboleva, Yulia Fomenko and Svetlana Cherkasova, plus field athletes Gulfiya Khanafeyeva and Darya Pishchalnikova.

In its ruling Wednesday, the court said the seven women appeared to have been involved in a “fraudulent manipulation” of their samples.

The International Association of Athletics Federations provisionally suspended the women last July — days before the Beijing Olympics — following an undercover investigation.

Russia’s athletics federation angered the world governing body by applying standard 2-year bans backdated to start in spring 2007, when the samples were given. That would have cleared the women to return at the world champions beginning Aug. 15.

A CAS panel of three lawyers, who heard the cases earlier this month, set aside that ruling which would have cleared the women to return at the Aug. 15-23 worlds.

Officials at the All Russia Athletics Federation could not be reached for comment.

“It was unacceptable to the IAAF that these athletes who had committed serious and deliberate breaches of our anti-doping rules would receive an effective ban of approximately 9-10 months,” the governing body said in a statement Wednesday.

Yegorova, now 37, won the 2001 world championship in the 5,000 meters, weeks after she had tested positive for the banned blood-booster EPO. She escaped a ban and was allowed to run because of mistakes made during the testing process.

The 34-year-old Tomashova won 1,500-meter gold at the 2003 and 2005 world championships. She is the current European champion.

The 26-year-old Soboleva won the 1,500-meter world indoor title in 2008, breaking her own world record set the previous month.

Fomenko won the 1,500 at the world indoors in 2006, and won silver behind Soboleva last year. The 29-year-old Fomenko finished second at the 2005 worlds but was disqualified for obstructing another runner.

Cherkasova, now 31, was sixth in the 800 meters at the 2007 worlds; the 27-year-old Khanafeyeva held the world record in hammer for 12 days in June 2006; and discus thrower Pishchalnikova, 24, is the reigning European champion.

Suspicions about the Russians first surfaced in early 2007 during a string of exceptional results despite a long series of negative test results. The IAAF began an undercover operation and subjected the women to out-of-competition doping controls beginning in April 2007.

The IAAF believed the athletes signed for urine samples that were not their own and compared the DNA results to those from in-competition samples given by the athletes.

The governing body said the outcome supported its strategy to catch drug cheats.

“It should provide a strong warning to any athletes who are considering doping that their samples will be stored and may be later reanalyzed, meaning they are never safe from the detection of their cheating against their fellow athletes,” the IIAF said.