The World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) has recommended a four-year ban against Russia for its failure to comply with WADA's demand that Russia must hand over all testing data from its Moscow laboratory.

The WADA Executive Committee will discuss this recommendation at its December 9 meeting in Paris.

Independent forensic experts found discrepancies in the data recovered from the Moscow Institute in January 2019. The complete transfer of data was one of the prerequisites for Russia to maintain its reinstatement after the 2015 state-sponsored doping scandal.

WADA stated in a press release that it needed the authentic data to ensure that Russian athletes who tested positive were punished and to ensure that innocent Russian athletes were cleared of suspicion.

WADA stated that the Moscow data was "neither complete nor fully authentic" and that when compared to the 2015 copy provided by the whistleblower, the 2019 copy of the laboratory data "shows that hundreds of presumed adverse analytical findings that appear in the 2015 copy of the LIMS database have been removed from the 2019 copy, and the associated underlying raw data and PDF files have been removed or altered."

Some of the alterations were made before WADA agreed to reinstate Russia, but "further significant deletions and/or alterations were made in December 2018 and January 2019 (i.e., after WADA ExCo imposed the data requirements)," the agency said.

WADA said the data contained "planted and fabricated evidence" that made it appear that whistleblower Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov and two co-conspirators had falsified entries "in a scheme to extort money from athletes" and that in 2014 and 2015 another He added that evidence proving that staff members were involved in the cover-up of doping by Russian athletes had been removed.

The doping scandal has already led to the expulsion of some of the Russian athletes from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and their participation in next year's Tokyo Olympics is also in jeopardy.

According to the New York Times, the WADA Executive Committee is expected to uphold the ban, which may then be challenged in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This would allow individual international federations to allow some athletes to participate as independent athletes.

The country could face further sanctions against all WADA members, including the UCI, including being banned from participating in all international competitions. From the report, it is unclear whether athletes will be allowed to compete as independent athletes in non-Olympic events such as UCI World Championships and World Cups, where they compete against national teams.

The Recommendation also calls for Russia to be banned from hosting or bidding for sporting events for four years and prohibits Russian officials/representatives from serving as "members of boards, commissions or other bodies of any member state of the Code (or any of its member states) or any association of member states."

Russian athletes may prove that they are not involved in a doping scheme either by being listed in the original independent report by Richard McLaren, by having no positive doping tests in laboratory data, or by having no manipulated sample data Only if they are able to do so may they compete in major competitions.

In 2016, track cyclists Dmitry Sokolov, Kirill Sveshnikov, and Dmitry Strakhov were banned from competing in Rio and attempted to sue McLaren and WADA for being "unfairly tainted as cheats and dopers."