“To see all the female athletes who will be here in Rio going for gold, going to represent their country the best they can and proud to be at the Olympics and obviously we are all here to do our best and I know we are going to be great role models”, Fox said.
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And, as such the Stepanovs believe drug cheats will still be representing Russian Federation when the Games get under way next month.
FILE in this Sunday, March 11, 2012 file photo, Russia’s Ilia Frolov runs through the finish line tape as he wins the men’s final in the Modern Pentathlon World Cup in Charlotte, in the U.S. Two Russian athletes in modern pentathlon have been barred from the Rio Olympics after being implicated in an alleged doping cover-up.
The entire Russian crew have been ruled ineligible.
It means women now outnumber men on Australia’s Olympic team for the first time at a summer Games, with 212 females and 207 men competing.
In revealing its judgement, World Rowing (FISA) said that those banned were “not at all considered to have participated in doping” but were not being allowed in as they “do not meet the conditions established by the IOC in their decision of 24 July 2016 for participation in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games”.
This, of course, is not happening to athletes from other countries, though doping is a fixture of high-achievement sports everywhere. Earlier this year, WADA published its 2014 anti-doping violations report.
They include Ivan Podshivalov and Anastasia Karabelshchikova, who were excluded because they previously served doping bans, while Ivan Balandin from Russia’s men’s eight was implicated in the McLaren report, World Rowing said.
CYCLING – Awaiting decision on 18 Russian cyclists. USA weightlifter Sara Robles, whose two-year ban for an androgenic steroid expired last year, would have been disqualified, too. Pavel Sozykin was the lone athlete banned from competing in Rio.
On Monday, swimming’s world governing body FINA ruled out seven Russians including reigning world 100m breaststroke champion Yulia Efimova.
Russian Federation won only one bronze medal in the shooting at London 2012 but claimed three golds, a silver and a bronze in judo.
The other six athletes on the Russian team were approved. The German tabloid Bild denounced International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach as “Putin’s Poodle”. And yet the decision was ultimately wise.
Here is the current state of play among the 28 Olympic sports. If so, making an example out of Russian Federation won’t work – anyone running a similar system with a crooked laboratory will just make doubly sure there are no leaks.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach insisted the unprecedented eligibility criteria put in place for Russians had teeth, with the country’s athletes having to clear “the highest hurdles” before going to the Games, which start in just 10 days.
“Others that have been covered up over the past years by the Russian sports authorities, they will compete as supposedly clean athletes”, the pair said in a joint BBC interview.
“The IOC showed that first of all there is no punishment for running a systematic doping programme in the largest country in the world”.
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Harting, who will be bidding to defend his Olympic title despite tearing a chest muscle and suffering an inflamed right knee at the start of the year, says under Bach’s presidency, the IOC has “reached a new level of disappointment”.
