If this turns out to be Thomas Bach’s defining moment, here’s what the leader of the International Olympic Committee will be remembered for: keeping Russian Federation as part of the club, but losing the trust of thousands of athletes who thought that, maybe this year, they’d get the answers they’ve been looking for.
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The IOC executive decided that any Russian athlete wanting to go to Rio, where the Games start on August 5, will have to prove that he or she was not involved in the doping which an independent investigator said was organised by the sports ministry and Russian secret service.
Russian Federation is waiting to find out whether its entire team will be excluded from next month’s Olympics over the country’s doping scandal.
Calls for a complete ban on Russian Federation intensified after Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer commissioned by WADA, issued a report Monday accusing Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing a vast doping program of its Olympic athletes.
But the International Olympic Committee board, meeting via teleconference, decided against the ultimate sanction, in line with Bach’s recent statements stressing the need to take individual justice into account.
The IOC said Russian athletes will have to satisfy the 28 federations who run the summer Olympic sports that they are clean.
Maybe with those thousands of athletes who have tirelessly filled out “whereabouts” forms over the years, then allowed themselves to be woken in the dark of night, or met while out for dinner, by an agent tasked with collecting urine samples as part of the comprehensive out-of-competition-testing programs that exist in dozens of countries.
Olympic leaders stopped short Sunday of imposing a complete ban on Russia from the Rio de Janeiro Games, leaving individual global sports federations to decide which athletes should be cleared to compete.
Clearly, this decision had every bit as much to do with politics as clean sports.
A previous CAS verdict suggests the International Olympic Committee rule could be overturned. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that such a punishment amounted to double jeopardy.
Zhukov, who attended Sunday’s telephone conference of the International Olympic Committee executive board, says he does not agree with the rule agreed just 12 days before the opening ceremony. It has whiffs of a politically driven bargain.
However, Sunday’s announcement means Russian athletes “will be accepted by the IOC” to compete in Rio if they can meet strict anti-doping criteria, have no doping history and are given the green light by their own sports governing body.
Bach said the International Olympic Committee considered the timing of Stepanova’s information dump – after she’d been cast aside by the Russian team – along with her record of doping.
The IOC also reiterated its “serious concerns” about the weaknesses in the fight against doping, and called on WADA to “fully review their antidoping systems”.
“We don’t have time enough to do such a thing”, Russian Olympic Committee President Alexander Zhukov said on Sunday, ruling out any CAS challenge by his organisation and dashing any lingering Olympic hopes for Stepanova.
The World Anti-Doping agency and other anti-doping bodies have recommended a ban on Russia’s entire team.
Antidoping leaders had argued that the extent of state-backed doping in Russian Federation had tainted the country’s entire sports system, and the only way to ensure a level playing field was to bar the whole team, even if some innocent athletes will lose out.
“A sad day for clean sport” said Joseph de Pencier, CEO of the Institute for National Anti-Doping Organizations, which represents 59 agencies across the globe.
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But a happy day for Russian Federation.
