Russia will absent from the Olympic Games next summer after a ruling handed down by the World Anti-Doping Agency on Monday. WADA's 12-member executive committee voted unanimously to implement a four-year international sports ban on Russia, punishment that had been proposed by its compliance review committee last month after WADA investigators found that the country tampered with drug-testing data earlier this year.
Russia's anti-doping agency, RUSADA, will have three weeks to appeal WADA's decision, and is expected to do so. The Court of Arbitration for Sport would be responsible for hearing an appeal. The move will effectively prevent Russia from having any formal presence at both the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, though Russian teams and athletes will still be allowed to compete as long as they are not linked to positive doping tests or the data tampering case. At the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, Russian athletes competed under a neutral flag as "Olympic Athletes from Russia."
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