The 2021 World Short Track Speed Skating Championships were held from 5 to 7 March 2021 in Dordrecht, Netherlands.
[1] Many prominent countries didn’t attend or boycotted the world championship for various reasons, some related to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Japan, China and South Korea.
The Netherlands, Italy, France, Hungary and Russia (as Russian Skating Union) were the only countries with all their top skaters and roster, hence raising the question of the validity of this world championship results.
Many elite athletes from last year World Cup standings were missing and some countries were limited to only two skaters per gender instead of usual three despite lack of entries.
[4][5][6] On 9 December 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned Russia from all international sport for a period of four years, after the Russian government was found to have tampered with laboratory data that it provided to WADA in January 2019 as a condition of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency being reinstated.