World Athletics will decide Thursday whether to start the procedure of reinstating the new-look Russian athletics federation, as well as initiating the process to allow Russian athletes who test clean to compete under a neutral banner at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Russia has been suspended by World Athletics (then known as the IAAF) since 2015 over repeated doping scandals — a ban upheld 12 times — and has been fighting for readmission. Moscow’s case has been made more complicated after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in December imposed a four-year ban from all international sporting competitions on Russia over what it considers a state-sponsored programme of doping, a suspension the country took to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
