“Under these exceptional circumstances, Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of the Olympic competitions, and the “presumption of innocence” can not be applied to them”, added the IWF.
Advertisement
Russia’s fight to reinstate their banned track and field athletes to the Olympics suffered a further blow on Friday night as the country’s weightlifting team were also thrown out en bloc.
Per the Press Association (via the Guardian), the International Olympic Committee decided against a complete ban on Russian athletes after a lengthy investigation into doping allegations and instead left the decision up to the federations.
“The integrity of the weightlifting sport has been seriously damaged on multiple times and levels by the Russians”, the IWF said in a statement.
Rio 2016 gets under way next week.
Speaking at the ceremony, Isinbayeva who was fighting back tears, said that Russian athletes were banned without a chance to defend themselves and called on the remaining athletes to show them what youre able to do for yourself and for us too..
Weightlifting became the second sport after track and field to issue blanket bans on Russian athletes.
“According to it, Sokolov and Sveshnikov (which basically means the entire cycle racing team) have been barred from the Rio Olympic Games, since their names are mentioned in Mr. McLaren’s report”.
The three cyclists withdrawn are believed to be road cyclist Sergey Shilov, Tour de France stage victor Ilnur Zakarin and Olga Zabelinskaya, a double bronze medallist on the road in 2012. “But suddenly we were confronted with the problem that this could not be considered as worldwide testing”, Mutko said, citing the testing criteria established by the IOC for each athletes’ participation in Rio.
The IWF took into consideration Richard McLaren’s report, which outlined several violations by the Russian weightlifting team, along with reanalysis of Russian samples from the 2008 and 2012 games which revealed previously undocumented positive doping results.
Advertisement
Bulgaria’s weightlifters had already been excluded from the Olympics a year ago, after 11 lifters at a training camp tested positive. “I am grateful to the majority of our sports federations that meticulously defended our athletes’ rights”, he said.
