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Boycotting Rio Olympics not on Russia’s agenda

The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, retaliating for the USA -led boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin called the doping allegations “a unsafe return to. letting politics interfere with sport”.

The Olympic Committee released a statement on their website saying that 387 competitors were included in the list.

FISA has written to the International Olympic Committee to ask if there is a deadline for the re-allocation of any possible quota slots if there would be a blanket ban on the Russian team or any other ban.

But some senior officials have expressed doubts whether the International Olympic Committee wants to expel Russian Federation.

Mutko on Tuesday denied all wrongdoing and said he expected his subordinates to be cleared.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russian Federation was not considering a boycott of the Olympics, which start on 5 August.

Zhukov insisted that Russian sportsmen were still “capable of competing for medals” at the event in Rio and said they were training in Russia, Portugal and Brazil.

“It is important to focus on the need for individual justice in all these cases”. McLaren’s investigation found those bottles had been tampered with in an effort to protect a list of doped Russian athletes competing in Sochi.

While Selyutin and Vlasova were unlikely to make the Russian team for Rio, their bans are a further blow for Russian weightlifting, which already risks being barred from the Olympics altogether for numerous earlier doping cases.

The report addressed accusations made by former Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory head Grigory Rodchenkov, who two months ago told the New York Times dozens of Russians used performance-enhancing drugs in Sochi with approval from national sports authorities.

Russian Federation is not banned from competing in Rio, but it still could be.

This comes despite the International Olympic Committee pledging to deny accreditation to any official of the Russian Sports Ministry or any person implicated in the McLaren Report.

Many organisations, including the United States Anti-Doping agency, have said that the Sochi revelations should lead to a blanket ban on Russian Federation.

This reluctance to immediately heed the calls for a radical and rapid response to Russia’s flagrant cheating will frustrate many but IOC President Thomas Bach is mindful of legal challenges and the risk of antagonising an Olympic superpower.

– The IOC will initiate reanalysis, including forensic analysis, and a full inquiry into all Russian athletes who participated in the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014 and their coaches, officials and support staff.

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“Protected” athletes – in other words, the cheats – magically produced clean samples using the midnight work of the doping enterprises which saw dirty samples exchanged for pristine ones through a concealed “mouse hole” in the lab wall. The International Association of Athletics Federations upheld the ban last month, a decision accepted by the IOC.

Russian officials are still waiting for the International Olympic Committee to decide whether they will be allowed to attend the 2016 Games