The IOC is reportedly looking into top Russian officials and is requesting that upcoming major olympic sanctioned winter sporting events be moved from Russia.
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The International Olympic Committee will explore its legal options over the possibility of banning all Russian athletes for the Rio Olympics following the publication of an independent investigator’s report on doping allegations in the country.
In its statement, the IOC said it would “explore the legal options with regard to a collective ban of all Russian athletes for the Olympic Games 2016 versus the right to individual justice”.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made a decision to open an investigation into the Russian doping allegations, to the surprise of absolutely no one. “I need to understand now that if this [ban] concerns me as well, I will accept it. This is not the most important issue at the moment”.
CAS is due to rule on Russia’s appeal against the decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to ban its track and field athletes from Rio.
McLaren said the cover-up started in 2010 after Russia’s “abysmal” results at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and continued until 2015 after the Sochi Games.
It also said it would not back the European Games, scheduled for the country in 2019.
Bekele had appealed a decision to leave him out of the marathon team due to a lack of race time, while his hopes of running the 10,000m in Rio were effectively dashed when he failed to finish a race in Hengelo, which doubled up as an Olympic trial. That’s already the case with the IAAF, which barred Russia’s track athletes from the games following previous WADA-commissioned reports into Russian doping.
But the International Olympic Committee ordered a disciplinary commission to look into his ministry’s role in what Monday’s report called a “state-dictated failsafe system” of drug cheating that included Russia’s secret service swapping dirty urine samples for clean ones through a hole in a wall in Sochi.
There will be mounting pressure for that to be extended, even though Bach and some global federations have called for a way for Russian athletes proved to be clean to compete in Rio.
He claimed Russia’s sports ministry was actively involved in doping – a claim that Russian officials have denied.
– The IOC will initiate reanalysis, including forensic analysis, and a full inquiry into all Russian athletes who participated in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics as well as their coaches, officials and support staff. A specific disciplinary commission has been set up to deal with this, and following its report the IOC executive board “will impose all the appropriate sanctions”.
Putin also noted that much like the Soviet and American boycotts of past Olympics, politics was again at the forefront of the current Russian doping scandal.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko told the R-Sport news agency he had suspended his anti-doping advisor Natalia Zhelanova as well as Irina Rodionova, deputy head of Russia’s state-funded Sports Preparation Centre, and two other officials.
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The IOC and all other global federations will be watching closely to see if the IAAF’s confidence in its position is justified, particularly as CAS ruled against an IOC anti-doping measure known as the Osaka Rule in 2011.
