Bach says a total ban on Russian Federation “would not be justifiable” on either moral or legal grounds “because every human being is entitled to certain rights of natural justice”.
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President Thomas Bach is confident that Rio de Janeiro will host great Games from Friday onwards and confirms that the International Olympic Committee is helping local organizers with advance payments.
The rest of the Olympic facilities and venues, including the much-criticised Guanabara Bay, the polluted body of water where the sailing competition will take place, are all being monitored thoroughly, Bach said. An global arbitration court has been called into play as banned athletes file appeals.
“Imagine the situation if we would not have taken a decision, what then the limbo would be”.
“We did our best to address the situation in a way that protected clean athletes”.
On Saturday, the IOC declared that a three-person panel would make the final decision on the Russian Olympic competitors.
And the lawsuit says ISF received its accreditation in 2009 from the World Anti-Doping Agency using false information, which precluded the WSF from receiving the same sanctioning because WADA will only recognize one federation per sport.
But mainly: no, Bach said, he is not regretting the decision by the IOC Executive Board to allow individual Russian athletes to plead their cases and apply for admission to the Games.
“The negative opinions are the ones most likely to be quoted”, he said. These are the allegations about the Sochi lab.
Bach rejected suggestions that the IOC’s response had been a failure, and took a shot at WADA for not having acted earlier based on whistle-blower evidence of cheating in Russia, and for having accredited the Russian doping labs at the centre of the scandal.
The most-recent investigation – called the McLaren Report – was not published until mid-July, at which point WADA suggested banning Russian Federation.
“The IOC can not be made responsible, neither for the timing nor for the reasons of these incidents we face now”, he said at an afternoon news conference. “We received a report from the organising committee and all the members were able to ask questions”, the IOC chief said.
The mandate of the McLaren report, he said, “was to reveal a system, and this he did in a really shocking way, a system that’s an attack on everything we want to represent”. The Olympic Village is receiving the athletes and delegations from around the world as they descend on Rio for the start of the Games.
Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko said Saturday he expected 266 athletes to compete.
The 13 anti-doping organisations are also furious about the decision to ban the whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova, who the IAAF had cleared to run as an example to others.
International Olympic Committee director of communications Mark Adams said: “Clearly it will depend on each individual athlete”.
Bach also insisted the doping scandal would not taint the Rio Games.
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The cases of Morozov and Lobintsev, also medal-winners in London and the Beijing Games in 2008, were heard by a CAS tribunal on Sunday with a new hearing set for Monday, CAS secretary general Matthieu Reeb told AFP. There will, as always, be some last-minute challenges.
