The World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency is a triumph for money over clean sport, according to the agency’s former director general.

Speaking to Press Association Sport, David Howman strongly criticised WADA president Sir Craig Reedie for caving in to pressure from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and sports federations eager to stage events in Russia again.

“I am a little disappointed, to say the least,” said Howman, who ran WADA from 2003 to 2016 and is now chair of the Athletics Integrity Unit.

“This looks like they have taken the decision to deviate from a carefully put-together roadmap for entirely pragmatic reasons.

“WADA has gone from being an organisation that cared about clean athletes to one that cares about international federations that have not been able to stage events in Russia: it’s money over principle. That is a quite a difference, quite a swing, from what WADA once was.”

RUSADA was suspended in November 2015 when its central role in the Russian doping scandal was first confirmed by an investigation led by former WADA president Richard Pound.

Canadian legal expert Professor Richard McLaren conducted a second, much wider investigation in 2016, and its findings shocked athletes and sports fans around the world, forcing the IOC to block its member federations from staging events in Russia until it had a compliant national anti-doping agency again.

One consequence of RUSADA’s reinstatement is that WADA does not have to declare international boxing federation AIBA non-compliant for giving its 2019 World Championships to Sochi.

The IOC has been pushing WADA hard to make such headaches go away and all six of its representatives on the 12-strong ExCo voted for the compromise deal on Thursday, with IOC member Reedie also backing it.

In fact, the deal, which was only finalised between Reedie and Russian sports minister Pavel Kolobkov last week, sailed through by nine votes to two, a result that provoked a furious response from athletes groups and national anti-doping agencies.

Instead of Russia having to acknowledge its doping was state-sponsored and grant unconditional access to the Moscow laboratory’s data and stored samples before reinstatement (in line with the mutually-agreed “roadmap to compliance” Howman referred to), it now only has to admit that “certain individuals” were to blame, and the lab access comes with conditions and a new timetable.

Like many in the anti-doping community, Howman is at a loss to understand why WADA has agreed to this.

Speaking after Thursday’s vote, Reedie said the decision “provides a clear timeline” for access to the lab’s secrets and RUSADA will be declared non-compliant again if it misses the deadlines, which are the end of the year for the lab’s data and the end of next June for sample re-analysis in any anti-doping cases.

Reedie added that “WADA understands this decision will not please everybody” but said “today, we are in a much better position”.

Howman, however, doubts this.

“Let’s say they rock up there and there are no data or samples, or the Russian police restrict access to them,” he said.

“What will WADA do then? Will they really vote to declare RUSADA non-compliant again?

“Normally with a conditional deal you wait for the conditions to be met before saying it has been satisfied, not the other way around.

“I think some people have tried to be too legally cute and they are assuming the other party will respect the niceties of British law. That is not the experience here.”

Beckie Scott quit her position at WADA over the controversial decision to reinstate RUSADA
Beckie Scott quit her position at WADA over the controversial decision to reinstate RUSADA (Jeff McIntosh/AP)

Howman is also highly critical of the way WADA reached this position, noting that the key meeting of the compliance review committee, WADA’s advisory body, was done by video conference and without all its members having the latest information.

Once that information – the letters between WADA’s leadership, Kolobkov and the committee’s chairman Jonathan Taylor QC – became public, via the media, the athletes’ representative on the panel, Canadian cross-country skier Beckie Scott, quit.

“It’s just not professional and I don’t like things being done in an unprofessional way,” said Howman.

On the issue of the IOC’s influence, the former IOC executive committee member said WADA had always “managed to walk the fine line” between the desires of its two sponsors, national governments and sport, “until Russia came along, because it was too big, too rich, too powerful”.