Russian swimmers Vladimir Morozov and Nikita Lobintsev have lodged appeals against their bans from the Rio Olympics with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
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The swimmer’s agent Andrei Mitkov on Monday said that she is ready to file the appeal.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) will hold swiftly convened hearings in Rio to decide on the appeals by the two, both medal winners for Russian Federation at past Olympics.
Lobintsev won a bronze medal at the 2012 London Games in the 4×100 freestyle relay.
The trio will take the final decision once Court of Arbitration for Sport arbitrators have reviewed the cases individually, International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams told reporters.
On Monday, swimming’s world governing body FINA banned both, along with their Russian compatriot Daria Ustinova, because their names appeared in Richard McLaren’s damning report into state-directed doping in Russia. Other sports have banned individual Russians but not all of the eligible athletes.
Morozov, 24, and Lobintsev, 27, have called on CAS to declare “invalid and unenforceable” an International Olympic Committee order for federations to exclude athletes implicated in an investigation on Russia’s state-run doping system.
The IOC executive board decided last Sunday not to ban the entire Russian Olympic team from the games.
They needed to have been tested for drugs outside Russia and have a spotless doping record with no previous bans in order to be cleared by their respective global federations.
Athletics was the first sport touched by the doping controversy.
The accusations of creating “a state-supported doping system” have been rejected by Russian authorities, who say that Russian athletes are being denied the opportunity to represent their country in Rio. “There has never been a clean Olympics and there is no reason to believe that Rio will be clean”, he told O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper.
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The IOC has said that any Russian athlete with a prior sanction for doping would not be allowed into the games.
