The world anti-doping agency has accused Russia of running a state-sponsored doping programme, which led to dozens of Russian athletes being banned from the Olympics, including the entire track-and-field team.
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Bach has said the International Olympic Committee is not responsible as it did not decide the release of the McLaren report nor control the anti-doping laboratories that Russian authorities have been accused of manipulating. Two swimmers could be told on Tuesday whether their demand to be allowed to compete has been successful.
Bach predicted this week that Rio will put on “great” Games, despite the doping scandal and multiple problems the organisers have faced preparing facilities for the 10,500 expected athletes.
“Justice has to be independent from politics”.
More than 100 Russian athletes, including the track and field team, are reported to have been banned from the Games.
Bach again blamed WADA for failing to act sooner on evidence of state-backed doping in Russia, saying it would be a travesty to make individual Russian athletes “collateral damage” for the wrongdoing of their government.
Meanwhile, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) say they are not the “bad guys” in the doping scandal that has rocked Russian sport ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
At least 117 of the 387 competitors Russian Federation had wanted to send to Rio have been excluded.
The IOC stopped short of imposing a blanket ban on Russian Federation, and apart from seeking the support of members Bach said that “we need a full review of WADA’s anti-doping system”.
“The result is death and devastation”, he said at the morning session. The cynical “collateral damage” approach is not what the Olympic movement stands for.
Members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution backing the IOC’s decision not to impose a blanket ban on Russia’s athletes.
“At times WADA has seemed to be more interested in publicity and self-promotion rather than doing its job as a regulator”, Werthein said.
Later in the International Olympic Committee session, WADA President Craig Reedie delivered this defence: “I would like to think not all the anti-doping system is broken, only part of the system is”.
Russian Federation has its first win of the Olympics.
“It puts pressure on the International Olympic Committee, it puts pressure on the athletes, so it’s a natural reaction to point the finger”. This mission of a better future for and through sport is what needs to guide us.
But Reedie also admitted that “parts” of the system were broken and that the anti-doping community and Olympic movement needed to come up with a better response to the level of criminality recently uncovered by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren’s report into cheating at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and other major events. Some 200 Russian athletes will participate in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro at the Maracana stadium on August 5, the leader of the Russian Olympic delegation, Igor Kazikov, has told TASS.
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An eagerly awaited one is the appeal by Nikita Lobintsev and Vladimir Morosov, two swimmers implicated by McLaren and initially banned by swimming’s world governing body FINA.
