Russia replies as IAAF consider doping sanctions

Vladimir Put / Russian President
Moscow (AFP) - Russia sent a formal reply to damaging allegations of "state-sponsored" doping to world athletics' governing body on Thursday as the IAAF prepared to consider suspending the track and field superpower.

"We have just sent our account to the IAAF," the acting president of Russia's athletics federation Vadim Zelichenok told TASS news agency.
Russian athletics was placed firmly in the doping dock and risked exclusion from next year's Rio Olympics after the explosive accusations contained in Monday's World Anti-Doping Agency report which rocked the Olympic's flagship sport.

Russia's immediate fate on the international stage is to be determined by athletics chief Sebastian Coe and the 27-strong IAAF council in a video-conference call meeting starting at 1800GMT on Friday.

Zelichenok told the R-Sports agency that Russia's athletics authorities had produced the response "in such a way as to try to prove our innocence".
"How many pages is it? One or 100, it's not important," he added.
In another development, Russia's Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov flew into Lausanne in Switzerland Thursday evening for talks with International Olympic Committee chief Thomas Bach, R-Sport reported. 

And the country's second-largest bank, VTB, announced it would not renew a sponsorship contract with the IAAF, but insisted the decision had nothing to do with the doping scandal.

The fallout from the report's damning conclusions reached as far up the ladder as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who held crisis talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi late Wednesday.

Putin ordered Russian officials to launch their own internal investigation and cooperate with international anti-doping authorities.

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