Legkov & Belov | FIS schedules hearing | Doubt about evidential value of documents to which the McLaren Report refers
The chairman of the FIS Doping Panel has set the date for the hearing on the request of the two athletes Alexander Legkov and Evgeniy Belov to lift the provisional suspension on Friday 13.1.2017, 2 pm.
The representative of the FIS as well as Alexander Legkov and RA Christof Wieschemann will meet in Zurich for this purpose. The members of the Doping Panel and Evgeniy Belov are connected via Video Conference. However, the written decision is not to be expected on Friday.
We welcome the opportunity to make the position of the athletes clear in a hearing. The Athletes are not to blame for an individual fault or involvement in the activities described by the McLaren Report in the Sochi laboratory, in particular because our analysis of the documents of the IP Evidence Disclosure Package has shown that those documents which are the sole link to individual athletes are suffering from serious errors.
The conviction of the athletes was not the aim of WADA’s mandate to Prof. McLaren, as Prof. McLaren himself stressed. We therefore do not challenge the work of Prof. McLaren with our analysis. But we have strong reasons for doubt about the documents on which he has based his work, as far as the athletes themselves are concerned.