Officials are considering banning the Russian national team from this summer’s Paralympics after the World Anti-Doping Agency has exposed evidence of a state-run doping scheme that has also put the country’s status for the Olympics in jeopardy, according to the New York Times.
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The poll conducted by ZDF television among 1,271 Germans saw 47 per cent in support of a blanket ban and 47 per cent against it.
Officials in Moscow have slammed the decision by CAS to reject its appeal against a ban from the world athletics body IAAF, calling it part of a broader political campaign by the West against Russian Federation.
He also ordered Russia’s Olympic committee to establish an anti-doping commission to include both Russian and global specialists to try to clean up the country’s image.
The IOC is now under pressure to extend the IAAF’s ban on Russian competitors in Rio to all sports, but is yet to deliver its verdict.
Putin is a keen athlete, with judo and ice hockey his favorite sports, while Bach has longstanding sports and personal links to Russian Federation.
“The report revealed an unimaginable scale of institutionalized doping in Russian sport that was orchestrated at the highest level”, said Sir Philip Craven, the president of the International Paralympic Committee.
Russian track and field athletes were banned from competing by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and are on the verge of missing the Olympics in Rio this August after a large-scale doping scandal in the country. The third and fourth waves are expected to continue throughout and after the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
Should a ban be imposed, Russia’s National Paralympic Committee (NPC Russia) would have 21 days to lodge an appeal, the IPC said.
Nineteen samples potentially doctored as part of the sample-swapping regime during the 2014 Sochi Paralympic Winter Games have been sent for further analysis.
Urine samples from Olympic competitors are frozen and retested years later as the technology becomes more sophisticated to detect banned substances.
Since he won Olympic gold in 1976, Bach’s chosen sport of fencing has been transformed, most recently by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, a Putin ally who has pumped large sums of his own money into the sport over eight years as president of the International Fencing Federation.
The agencies also called for the establishment of a “task force” to “apply a uniform set of criteria to determine whether individual Russian athletes should be permitted to participate in the Rio Olympic Games under a neutral flag”.
She had appeared at the last three Olympics.
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A total 24 candidates were approved by the IOC Executive Board last December, but Italy’s Alessandra Sensini has since withdrawn.
