Moscow: With Russia’s track and field team facing exclusion from next year’s Olympics, the coach of pole vault great Yelena Isinbayeva says banning the entire team would unjustly punish clean athletes.

The sport’s governing body is scheduled to decide Friday whether to suspend Russia, the first step toward preventing the country from competing on the track at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Evgeny Trofimov, Isinbayeva’s longtime coach and mentor, said that banning the entire Russian team would “breach the most basic law, the presumption of innocence.”

Trofimov says Isinbayeva has never had any involvement with doping and “athletes who are clean should not suffer.”

Trofimov also says Isinbayeva, who last competed in 2013, is in good shape and could break her own world record next year.

Russia meanwhile has rejected as “groundless” accusations of widespread doping and corruption in athletics and promised a rapid response to avoid suspension from the 2016 Olympics.

“Until any proof has been put forward, it is hard to accept any accusations as they seem rather groundless,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated Tuesday.

With fears the scandal might go far beyond Russia’s borders and involve other sports, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) took the first concrete measure since Monday’s damning report from its independent commission by suspending Moscow’s heavily-criticised anti-doping laboratory.

Athletics was rocked by an avalanche of allegations including accusations of Russian “state-sponsored” doping contained in the 335-page findings.

IAAF president Sebastian Coe has given the Russian athletics federation (ARAF) “until the end of the week” to respond or risk possible suspension, with the IAAF Council set to meet in Monaco on Friday.

Despite the Kremlin’s dismissive reaction, ARAF assured Coe that it would contact the IAAF “in the very near future” outlining its anti-doping programme and “its reaction to the deductions and conclusions” in WADA’s report.

Calls for Russia, fourth in the 2012 London Olympics medal table, to be banned from next year’s Olympic Games are growing.

UK Athletics chief Ed Warner told BBC Radio 4: “Lord Coe ... says that his (IAAF) council is meeting to consider sanctioning Russia and possibly to suspend them. My strong advice would be: you’ve absolutely got to do that.”

Worryingly, according to WADA, the athletics scandal is by no means confined to Russia nor athletics.

“Russia is not the only country, nor athletics the only sport, facing the problem of orchestrated doping in sport,” the report, triggered by German broadcaster ARD’s documentary last December, warned.

WADA’s independent commission chairman Dick Pound added: “We certainly do not think that Russia is the only country with a doping problem and we don’t think athletics is the only sport with a doping problem.

“It seems pretty clear from both the ARD programme and subsequent developments that Kenya has a real problem. It’s been very slow to acknowledge that there is a problem.”

ARD’s documentary claimed that a third of the 146 world and Olympic medals awarded between 2001 and the 2012 London Olympics, featuring 18 Kenyans, were tainted by suspicions of doping.

— AP