Richard McLaren, who was commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, issued a report that accused Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing doping among Olympic athletes in more than two dozen summer and winter sports.
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Russia’s weightlifting team has been barred from competing at the Rio Olympics in August over doping offences, the sport’s governing federation said on Friday.
The International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) on Friday banned the eight strong weightlifting team, saying Russian athletes have to assume collective responsibility following positive results of seven dope tests which have been re-examined from past Olympics. It called the punishment an “appropriate sanction” to “preserve the status of the sport”.
In total, 11 of the 17 original names put forward by the Russian Olympic Committee to ride in Rio have been given clearance.
Okulov is a world champion while at the London Games in 2012, Albegov claimed a bronze medal and Kashirina took home a silver.
She says in an Instagram post that she had filed an application with the IAAF as an individual to have her case reconsidered, but “they didn’t make an exception for me”.
A petition set up on the change.org website in a bid to persuade the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reverse its decision not to allow whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova to compete at Rio 2016 has attracted over 50,000 signatures less than three days after being launched.
The entire Russian Weightlifting team has been banned from 2016 Rio Olympics.
Eight Russian weightlifters were scheduled to compete in the games.
The panel will consist of three executive board members: Turkey’s Ugur Erdener, chairman of the International Olympic Committee medical commission; Germany’s Claudia Bokel, head of the athletes’ commission; and Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., a vice president of the modern pentathlon federation. Athletes will have to overcome a presumption of guilt, but given the limited time left before the Games, and the influence Moscow can bring to bear, overtly and otherwise, on the various federations, this is a dragnet through which many Russians will slip.
“The [Russian Weightlifting] Federation will do everything in its power to rehabilitate us, but it is impossible to do it before the Olympics; there is no time to do anything”, Russian weightlifter Aleksey Lovchev told RT, commenting on the IWF decision.
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Nevertheless, the court dismissed her appeal along with that of 66 other athletes on July 21, as they did not meet the stringent eligibility criteria, with one of them involving being regularly checked by doping officers outside Russian Federation.
