On Sunday in Rio de Janeiro the Olympic Village was officially opened but it was not the celebration that the Rio 2016 organisers, International Olympic Committee or National Olympic Committees were expecting. There we have set the bar to the absolute limit for how Russian athletes can achieve to compete in Rio.
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CCTV’s Julia Lyubova reports from Moscow.
“The decision to refuse her entry in to the Games is incomprehensible and will undoubtedly deter whistleblowers in the future from coming forward”, the American said.
“The IAAF has already established its eligibility pool with regard to Russian athletes”.
Calls for a complete ban on Russian Federation intensified after Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer commissioned by WADA, issued a report Monday accusing Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing a vast doping program of its Olympic athletes.
The decision follows a report in which Canadian law professor Richard McLaren alleged Russian Federation operated a state-sponsored doping program from 2011 to 2015, including during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
But now, because of today’s ban on athletes with previous doping sanctions, the International Olympic Committee says Stepanova will not be eligible to compete.
“An athlete should not suffer and should not be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated”, Bach told reporters on a conference call after Sunday’s meeting.
Back acknowledged the decision “might not please everybody”.
“A decision that shows that the IOC’s primary concern is not to protect the clean athletes, not to be able to look them in the eye and promise they did all they could to ensure a level playing field”.
Separately, an International Olympic Committee ethics commission also ruled that 800m runner Yuliya Stepanova, who turned whistleblower on doping in Russian athletics, could not go to Rio even as a neutral. Stepanova, now living in hiding with her husband and son, wanted to be at Rio as a “neutral” athlete.
However, the International Olympic Committee has placed restrictions on the Russian team, including a measure barring the selection of any athletes who have previously served doping bans.
The IOC said Russian athletes will have to satisfy the 28 federations who run the summer Olympic sports that they are clean. Individual decision on Russian athletes will be taken by relevant global federations. Any of those implicated should not be allowed into the games, it said.
“As far as the criteria announced for the Russian team on the eve of the Olympic Games they are of course very tough”, Mutko said. Last week, appeals from more than 60 Russian track and field athletes were rejected by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The IOC said it would propose measures for more transparency and independence.
But Russia has hailed the IOC’s “objective” decision.
USADA also hit out at the decision to ban doping whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova from taking part in the Olympics. And Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is a sports powerhouse, a huge country seeking to reaffirm its status on the world stage, and a major player in the Olympic movement. Some athletic federations have said they’d ban some competitors in their sports, especially those sports that have had a lot of doping problems, for instance – weightlifting.
Putin, citing the US and Soviet-led boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Games, said the Olympic movement “could once again find itself on the brink of a division”.
Tygart said many athletes and whistleblowers had the courage to confront the culture of state-supported doping in Russian Federation.
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Russian Federation faces a possible ban from the Paralympic Games. I think every athlete should understand that doping is not fair, that doping is wrong towards other countries’ athletes.
