“We, Team Canada – 35 million people strong – will be watching and cheering on 314 Canadian athletes at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games”.
Advertisement
Efimova had been provisionally suspended by swimming governing body Fina in March after a positive test for meldonium, the endurance-boosting drug banned as of January.
World champion Yulia Efimova led five Russian swimmers who won Olympic reprieves on Friday taking their doping-tainted country to at least 276 competitors at the Rio Games.
It said in a statement that the athlete concerned had returned a positive test at the beginning of July and had now left the Olympic Village.
It was the latest in a series of last-minute doping-related rulings on Russian competitors that have turned the build-up to Rio into a legal obstacle course. Dozens of athletes were later excluded.
However, CAS outlawed that decision yesterday, potentially reopening a way in for her.
Wrestler Viktor Lebedev and sailor Pavel Sozykin were waiting to hear the result of appeals to CAS against their exclusion from Rio.
Efimova’s name is now missing from the starting list for the 100m breaststroke, whose heats take place today, and Wednesday’s 200m, the event in which she won an Olympic bronze medal in London in 2012.
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.
Reedie and WADA have defended the timetable of their investigative report, which wasn’t released publicly until July 18, less than three weeks before the start of the Rio Olympics, by saying the organization moved as quickly as possible once presented with “concrete” evidence of systematic doping.
Advertisement
Russia’s double Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva has been controversially added to a list of 23 candidates vying for four posts on the International Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission. The toughest attacks have come from his native Germany, some officials called for him to resign.
