The IOC also made clear that Russian runner and whistleblower Yulia Stepanova will not be able to compete in Rio given her previous doping sentence. The 62-year-old former fencing gold medallist and lawyer preached a “zero-tolerance” policy on banned substances but has been forced to walk a fine diplomatic line.
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The IOC said the federations would have to apply their own rules if they want to ban an entire Russian team from their events in Rio, as the IAAF has already done for track and field.
The IOC was considering the sanction in light of the latest report into state-sponsored Russian doping, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s decision to uphold a ban on 68 of the country’s track-and-field competitors.
In a statement, the IOC said it would accept the entry of only those Russian athletes who meet certain conditions set out for the 28 global federations to apply.
The federations might also consider each athlete’s case individually. Her status was unclear after the IOC’s ruling.
Russian athletes wishing to compete in Rio will be accepted only if they can “provide evidence to the full satisfaction” of their respective worldwide federations that they have never been involved with doping, the IOC statement said.
The United Kingdom’s sports minister Tracey Crouch said that “the scale of the evidence in the McLaren report arguably pointed to the need for stronger sanctions rather than leaving it to the worldwide federations at this late stage”. “Any non-availability for this programme will lead to the immediate withdrawal of the accreditation by the International Olympic Committee”, the statement added. “In this way we protect these clean athletes”, Bach said.
The IOC’s announcement comes in the wake of a flood of damning reports documenting a widescale, state-sponsored doping program in Russian Federation, and a sophisticated effort to disguise it. Prof. McLaren states in his report that it “fulfils partially the mandate of the Independent Person”.
In the text of Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov’s speech to the board, he compares a blanket ban on all Russian athletes to catching a criminal and then placing “his family, friends and acquaintances behind bars just because they knew the criminal or they live in the same town”.
Responding to the McLaren report, the IOC president, Thomas Bach, warned there had been “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games” yet his friendship with the Russian president, Vladmir Putin, meant that he continued to find a way to allow some Russian athletes to compete.
Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, a two-time Olympic champion, welcomed the IOC’s decision to ban Stepanova, who has been vilified as a traitor by Russian officials, fans, and media.
“Furthermore, the sanction to which she was subject and the circumstances in which she denounced the doping practices which she had used herself, do not satisfy the ethical requirements for an athlete to enter the Olympic Games”.
USADA was one of many anti-doping bodies, including WADA, that wanted IOC-level action against Russian Federation. “It was objective and taken in the interests of world sport and the unity of the Olympic family”. “The decision was reached after hard debates”, but it allows clean Russian athletes to prove their rights to compete in Rio, he said.
The decision came after the committee’s ruling executive board met Sunday via teleconference to decide santions following new allegations of a government-sponsored doping program involving Russian athletes in summer and winter sports from 2011-2015. The remaining 15 competed in London and represented two sports.
That suspension was introduced in response to a previous independent WADA report on doping a year ago.
How many sports will take up Coe’s offer, though, is uncertain, particularly as a number of past officials of the IAAF were shown to have been complicit in the cover-up of positive drug tests. As such, their world governing bodies are likely to take a stronger view.
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Meanwhile, speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek programme on Sunday, McLaren insisted that of the 10,500 athletes competing in Rio, only a tiny amount would be on performance-enhancing drugs.
