The IOC also said any athletes specifically named in the McLaren report should be excluded.
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Even as the Olympics began, the process was still in its final stages, but Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov says Russia will have the cleanest team at Rio. “There’s now potentially a way to get through”.
Russian boxers, tennis players, judokas and shooters were among those given the last-minute approval by an International Olympic Committee panel set up to review the eligibility of all Russian athletes previously cleared to compete by their international federations.
Vladimir Morozov and Nikita Lobintsev had been banned after being implicated in the Richard McLaren report on state-run doping in Russian Federation.
Likewise, the International Judo Federation confirmed that all of Russia’s competitors in the sport will also be competing, while the International Shooting Sport Federation greenlighted 18 Russian shooters for the Games.
Russia’s 11 Olympic boxers have been given the green light to compete at the Rio Games.
Also Thursday, the International Olympic Committee rule barring Russian athletes with prior doping sanctions from competing in the games was rejected as “unenforceable” by a sports arbitration panel, a decision which could open the door to further appeals and more Russians being entered.
With appeals involving a dozen other Russian swimmers, wrestlers and weightlifters still to be decided, the controversy over state-run doping blamed on the Russian government threatened to overshadow Friday’s opening ceremony.
The IOC, however, will maintain that it has done as much as it could in the time available and with the firm evidence they had.
“This is really a milestone in the innovation of the Olympic programme, which we can then experience in four years from now in Tokyo 2020”, Bach said.
That is a step that 17 of their team-mates failed to navigate, as World Rowing applied the IOC’s criteria more strictly than any other worldwide federation apart from the global Association of Athletics Federations.
Rowers Anastasia Karabelshikova and Ivan Podshivalov appealed the IOC’s decision to bar any Russians who have served a ban for doping from competing. “We had to respect basic principles of natural law”.
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In the first Olympic action, Sweden’s 1-0 win over South Africa in women’s football started in a almost empty Rio Olympic stadium.
