“This review panel will look at every single decision of every single athlete to make sure that the International Olympic Committee is happy with the decision that’s been taken, that they’ve made all of these different levels of steps and that the decision by the ICAS arbitrator is also putting that forward”.
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Meanwhile at a press briefing in Rio, IOC spokesman Mark Adams says the organization is pleased with the way things are going.
On Monday, swimming’s world governing body FINA banned both, along with their Russian compatriot Daria Ustinova, because their names appeared in Canadian law professor Richard McLaren’s damning report.
The IOC stopped short of applying a blanket ban in a move criticised by Wada and others, while swimmers Vladimir Morozov and Nikita Lobintsev have become the first Russian athletes to appeal against their ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, has promised there will also be an appeal to CAS against the blanket ban of the country’s weightlifting team.
The new panel consists of: Ugur Erdener, chairman of the International Olympic Committee medical commission; Claudia Bokel, head of the athletes’ commission; and Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., vice president of the modern pentathlon federation.
A total of 225 Russians have so far been approved to compete in Rio, with 47 across boxing, golf, gymnastics, handball and taekwondo still waiting to hear from their respective federations.
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 worldwide federations.
He added that the process would be completed by Friday, the day the Games open.
Stepanov, who with his 800m runner wife Yuliya Stepanova, gave details of the state-run doping programme to a German documentary in 2014, said efforts to clean up sport had failed.
Instead, Olympic leaders asked the federations to adjudicate each case individually under strict guidelines. “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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“Unfortunately, doped athletes will be competing”, said the former Russian anti-doping agency (Rusada) official, now living in hiding in the United States with his wife.
