Russian weightlifters will not be allowed to compete at the Olympics after the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) elected to ban them from the upcoming Games. There should be a ceremony at the beginning of each Olympics in which athletes who were cheated out of medals in prior Olympics are awarded medals with the appropriate pomp and circumstance.
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The Australians didn’t have time to ship their boat to Brazil and will borrow a boat from a Rio rowing club, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) says.
The Australian gymnastics team are awaiting a decision by the global federation (FIG) on Russian athletes to see if they will replace them, while the women’s eight rowing crew has been handed a berth in place of a banned Russian team.
Among those banned, Artem Okulov is a world champion while Ruslan Albegov took a bronze medal at the 2012 London Games and Tatiana Kashirina a silver.
The IOC has taken fierce criticism for not ordering a blanket ban on Russian Federation after an independent report said there was state-organized doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
The IOC executive is to meet on Saturday and Sunday to discuss the crisis.
While numerous 150 competitors were not on the banned anti-doping list, 67 of them were after a Wada report opened the floodgates on a seemingly endless stream of damaging reports into state-sponsored doping.
The Badminton World Federation cleared Russia to compete, saying that the players had been subject to a rigorous drug-testing programme in the lead-up to the Games. It is not yet known when this will be announced however.
Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes has apologized and acknowledged Australia’s allocated building was the worst in the village. “We have a very strong team of athletes who are going to be in the top eight”, Gibson said.
Rio mayor Eduardo Paes apologised and acknowledged Australia’s allocated building was the worst in the village.
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“Under these exceptional circumstances, Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of the Olympic competitions, and the “presumption of innocence” can not be applied to them”, added the IWF. There’s a lot of workers and contractors smoking in the village and the athletes’ village is a non-smoking venue. A spokesman for the Rio organizing committee said cardboard caught fire in the basement area.
