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International Olympic Committee decides against blanket ban on Russian Federation at Olympics

Russian athletes who want to take part in the events will have to meet strict criteria set by the IOC.

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Even the Rio ambitions of the track and field athlete who helped to expose the doping scheme, Yulia Stepanova, are over.

Russian Federation has escaped a blanket ban on their athletes ahead of next month’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr McLaren’s investigation, based heavily on evidence from former Moscow doping lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, affirmed allegations of brazen manipulation of Russian urine samples at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, but also found state-backed doping had involved 28 summer and winter sports from 2011 to 2015.

Russian Federation however may not be able to organize the 2019 European Games.

Russia faced the possibility of a complete ban after the World Anti-Doping Agency released a report Monday confirming that Russian authorities played a direct role in a massive cover-up of their athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The International Association of Athletics Federations had originally approved her to compete under a neutral flag, but the IOC overturned that decision Sunday because she had been sanctioned for doping in the past.

The Russian olympic team has escaped an all-out ban from Rio 2016 in the wake of the country’s doping scandal.

The IOC statement added: “The executive board would like to express its appreciation for Mrs Stepanova’s contribution to the fight against doping and to the integrity of sport”.

It also confirmed professor Richard McLaren would continue his investigative work into doping and “identify athletes that might have benefited from manipulation of the doping control process to hide positive doping tests”.

Shortly after the announcement, Vitaly Mutko, Russia’s Sports Minister, said that he was grateful for the decision, adding that the International Olympic Committee criteria were tough.

“I am sure that most of the global federations have no issues with Russian athletes”, R-Sport, a sports division of RIA Novosti news agency, quoted Mutko as saying.

It believes the International Olympic Committee has taken the strongest possible measures by ensuring Russian athletes have to prove they’re clean. While this report was about the system he revealed in Russian Federation and the Moscow laboratory, for the International Olympic Committee the hard part was to take decisions about individual athletes and how it affects each and every one of them.

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“The decision of the IOC to not take matters into their own hands but pass on the hot potato to International Federations shows a lack of will to back the core principles of their organisation with hard decisions”, he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin left and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach sit at a cafe along the promenade on the Black Sea near the Olympic Park at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia