The International Shooting Sport Federation has also cleared 18 Russian shooters to compete in Rio. The IOC set up a panel of three executive board members to make the final call, taking into account the advice of an independent sports arbitrator.
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“The Russian team may have experienced the toughest checks of the Olympics, because they had to go through multiple tests and [checks]”, Zhukov said.
Some Russian athletes competing in canoeing, cycling, rowing, sailing, swimming, and wrestling have been banned, while some are allowed to compete.
The New York Times reported, “In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at worldwide competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said”.
“I think there is no other team that is so clean and carefully controlled as the Russian one”, Russian Olympic president Alexander Zhukov declared. Ms. Stepanova had asked to compete not on Russia’s behalf, but as a neutral, stateless athlete; officials said no because she had a past drug violation.
The three-member International Olympic Committee commission has final say on which Russian athletes can compete in the Rio Games after allegations of state-sponsored doping contained in a report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency led to wholesale bans.
“As a result, we will not file an appeal to CAS”.
Alexander Zhukov said it was unfair Russian sports stars such as double Olympic champion pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva would now watch the Games from home while past doping offenders, including top U.S. runner Justin Gatlin, took to the field.
This follows a previous report by the same agency documenting rampant doping among Russia’s track and field athletes.
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 global federation apart from the worldwide Association of Athletics Federations. The IOC panel hopes to resolve all doping cases by Saturday, a day after the formal opening of the games.
A three-person International Olympic Committee panel had assessed which athletes from Russian Federation can take part after the World Anti-Doping Agency report last month. The ruling may allow more than the current 271 approved Russian athletes to compete.
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“We want to tell Bach: game over, you may leave”, said Ines Geipel, a former sprinter who now heads an association to help the thousands of ex-athletes involved in the former East German state’s doping programme.
