“8 athletes were nominated by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to compete in the Rio Olympic Games weightlifting events”. The final number expelled will be determined by independent arbiters appointed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
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The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appealed to the world to lay down their weapons and put aside their differences during the Rio Games in August.
“It’s always a concern, nobody wants to have athletes there who are doping”, she said.
In doing so, the federation pointed to the multiple cases of doping by the country’s weightlifters.
Australian team spokesman Mike Tancred said about 100 athletes and officials were evacuated from their building in the sprawling athletes’ village. Isinbayeva, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, has become a de facto spokeswoman for Russian athletes excluded from the Olympics and gave a tearful address to the team in the Kremlin on Wednesday.
“The AIBA and the International Olympic Committee are doing their job to make sure anybody participating will be clean”, she said.
Instead of an outright ban on Russian participation, as the World Anti-Doping Agency had urged, the IOC will impose a convoluted case-by-case review of Russian athletes, carried out by the 28 global federations that govern each Olympic sport.
They were on a mission to explain to the athletes the reasons behind the increased drug testing that has led some of the members of the track and field team to complain they were being ambushed by the Doping Control Officials (DCOs) and the frequency of the tests.
Weightlifting is a sport historically associated with doping offenses, and Russia’s athletes have been some of the most heavily implicated in the recently-published McLaren Report sponsored by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which allegedly exposed state-sponsored cheating.
At Beijing 2008 Russian Federation had won seven medals, four silver and three bronze. “We should do so after the Olympic Games”.
But allowing them to compete for Russian Federation is the same as absolving a state-engineered doping program.
All teams are given specific slots and a brief but elegant ceremony is held to officially welcome them into the Olympic Village, even though they have been staying in it for a few days.
Russian taekwondo fighters, weightlifters, badminton players and golfers are still awaiting a decision on whether they will be participating in this year’s Games.
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Terekhov says he received a letter from the WTF and that “we were told that all three of our athletes have officially been admitted to compete in the Olympic Games”.
