The IOC announced its decision Thursday night, less than 24 hours before the Olympic flame is lit, signifying the games are officially open.
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She was ruled out of the Rio Games when the International Olympic Committee chose to ban any Russian who had served a doping ban. Other sports with zero Russian players: weightlifting and rowing.
Two Russian rowers, Anastasia Karabelshikova and Ivan Podshivalov have won their appeal against an International Olympic Committee ban from the Rio Olympics on the grounds that they had already served suspensions over past doping accusations.
She was facing a lifetime ban as a two-time offender after serving a 16-month suspension after testing positive for the steroid DHEA in late 2013.
But it said the International Olympic Committee was wrong to insist Russian athletes who had previously been sanctioned could not go to the Games, calling the decision “unenforceable”.
Russian news agency R-Sport said 29 swimmers and canoeing world champion Andrey Kraitor were also free to compete at the Games.
One of the lead investigators into the Russian doping crisis accused the World Anti-Doping Agency of contributing to the chaos ahead of the Olympics by not pushing for a probe into the country’s entire sports system at an earlier date.
“The consistently cowardly manner in which the IOC deals with Russian Federation is no more than pure cynicism”, she charged, adding that “lies and cover-ups are becoming the norm while the Olympic charter and good sense is being turned into laughing stocks”.
The IOC gave the federations the job of determining which Russians should be eligible after opting against a blanket ban of the country. “But we can not deprive them of the right to prove that innocence”, Bach said. “For me, after this decision you have to be able to look into the eyes of all the athletes and during my many visits to the village here in Rio I have been looking into eyes of many athletes”.
“Of course I was very excited”, Hingis said of the plan to join forces with Federer.
“We wanted to follow the rules of justice, independent from politics”.
One of the athletes who could take advantage of the new ruling is whistleblower Yulia Stepanova who, together with her husband, ignited the Russian doping scandal by revealing the extent of the state-backed doping program.
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But the Court of Arbitration for Sport said the Olympic ban was “unenforceable” because an athlete could not be punished twice for the same doping offense. “We had to respect basic principles of natural law”. “At no point did the International Olympic Committee, unlike the IAAF, demand publicly from the Russian sports authorities that they recognize our whistle-blowing as an important and valuable contribution for clean sport in Russia”.
