The high-profile drug sting that led to the suspension of seven Russian athletes on the eve of the Olympic Games was undermined yesterday when they were handed bans that would free them to compete at next year’s World Championships. The punishment, imposed by the Russian Athletics Federation, will almost certainly lead to the case ending up in the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, must ratify the punishment and the chances of that happening are negligible. Indeed, there is a suspicion that the Russian authorities have manipulated the situation cynically by backdating the two-year bans to April 2007, when the first suspect tests were conducted. If the Russian federation has its way, Yelena Soboleva will be free to compete in the 1,500 metres at the World Championships in Berlin in August, barely a year after being caught out by DNA testing.

Nick Davies, the IAAF communications director, said that the Russian federation had been given five days to provide a full transcript of its decision, but it is likely that any common ground will be lost in that translation. The IAAF sting took place at the World Indoor Championships in Valencia in March after months of suspicion that the Russians were tampering with urine samples. Having caught the cheats, it will be anathema to the IAAF to see the athletes let off with what amount to nine-month bans. Instead, it will want the athletes banned from the original date of their suspension, which would sideline them until 2010.

Those athletes banned by the Russian federation were Soboleva, Olga Yegorova, Tatyana Tomashova, Yulia Fomenko, Svetlana Cherkasova, the runners; Darya Pishchalnikova, the discus thrower, and Gulfiya Khana-feyeva, the hammer thrower.

Soboleva set a world indoor record at 1,500 metres in Valencia, but it was there that the IAAF’s antidoping arm took samples to compare with ones stored over many months. The findings were deemed a huge feather in the cap of the antidoping police and were partly responsible for Lisa Dobriskey, of Great Britain, becoming a medal contender at the Olympics. “It’s thrown a cloud over the whole event,” Dobriskey, who finished fourth in Bei-jing, said. Tomashova is a two-times world champion at the distance.

Soboleva will be stripped of her world indoor record and, like Pishchalnikova, will need to return the silver medal she received at the 2007 World Championships. The same goes for Fomenko, who took silver at the world indoors. One embarrassing aspect of the successful operation is that the reallocation of medals could lead to Daniela Yordanova being elevated to a world indoor bronze at 1,500 metres. The Bulgarian is banned after failing a drugs test in June.