Individual sports’ governing bodies will have to decide if Russian competitors are clean and able to take part.
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U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart said the “IOC has refused to take decisive leadership” in a most important moment for the integrity of the Olympic Games and clean athletes.
Russian doping scandal: how did we reach this point? “This may not please everybody, but this result is one which is respecting the rules of justice and all the clean athletes all over the world”.
The IOC’s decision on Sunday follows the release on 18 July of an independent report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) into doping in Russian sports.
On July 24, the International Olympic Committee held a meeting of its executive board to discuss possible blanket ban of Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics.
The World Anti-Doping Agency and 14 national anti-doping organisations had urged the International Olympic Committee to impose a blanket ban following the allegations.
Calls for a complete ban on Russian Federation intensified after Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer commissioned by WADA, issued a report accusing Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing a vast doping program of its Olympic athletes.
The IOC said this week that it would not organise or give patronage to any sports event in Russia, including the planned 2019 European Games, and that no member of the Russian Sports Ministry implicated in the report would be accredited for Rio.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) said it would not review the Rio competition entries of Russian athletes and offered “assistance” to other sports federations in preparing individual rulings after the IOC decision.
In a way, the International Olympic Committee and its president may have saved the Games As We Know Them, with their decision Sunday not to ban the entire Russian team from the Rio de Janeiro Games.
Anti-doping leaders had argued that the extent of state-backed doping in Russian Federation had tainted the country’s entire sports system, and the only way to ensure a level playing field was to bar the whole team, even if some innocent athletes will lose out.
Welshman Davies, Olympic long jump champion at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics supported the IAAF’s decision to ban Russia’s athletics team.
“Furthermore, the sanction to which she was subject and the circumstances in which she denounced the doping practices which she had used herself, do not satisfy the ethical requirements for an athlete to enter the Olympic Games”.
Maybe with those who’ve been directly cheated out of medals by a Russian doper.
Bach said the International Olympic Committee considered the timing of Stepanova’s information dump – after she’d been cast aside by the Russian team – along with her record of doping. Chained shut and padlocked, it contains the samples of 40 Russian athletes who tested positive for doping during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.
Deapite IOC’s appreciation, whistleblower Yulia Stepanova will not be allowed to compete as a neutral athlete in Rio.
“The decision of the IOC to not take matters into their own hands but pass on the hot potato to International Federations shows a lack of will to back the core principles of their organisation with hard decisions”, said Drug Free Sport New Zealand chief executive Graeme Steel.
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And you have incompetent Olympic leaders who talk grandly about cleaning up the games, then bow to Mr. Putin when given a chance to make the biggest statement ever about the evils of doping in sports.
