USA TODAY Sports
In announcing the final revealing details of Russian state-sponsored doping in a report earlier this month, Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren was clear on his mandate — investigating Russian doping but not adjudicating it.
The Herculean task of doing that now falls to the international federations (IFs), who could spend months if not years pursuing anti-doping rule violations against the hundreds of athletes involved in the Russian state-sponsored system.
As those federations pursue individual cases, calls remain for a larger sanction for Russia.
“I think what will be a problem is individual cases with individuals pleading I was forced to do it or I didn’t know how it was done,” said Dionne Koller, director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore.