Great joy from hard work In addition to being extremely committed, Olympic athletes have to work extraordinarily hard to be selected for the games, let alone be on form when competing in them.
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The 271 clearances made official by late Thursday represented about 70 percent of the 387 Russian athletes originally selected by the country to participate in the Olympics, with the bulk of the absentees being track and field athletes.
As a result of Canadian professor Richard McLaren’s report, Russian Federation were in danger of having their entire Games team booted out of the event once the depth and scale of the doping programme had been exposed.
She also served as the mayor of the Olympic Village at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, an honorary role, but upset many athletes in the build-up to the Games by backing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s controversial anti-gay law.
The Lausanne-based court said barring them from the Games “does not respect the athletes’ right of natural justice”.
The Canadian lawyer, clearly frustrated at reactions to his work, said:”People have misconstrued what went into that report, particularly the IOC and worldwide federations”.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has criticised WADA s handling of the crisis and said the anti-doping system needs a total overhaul.
“It has been completely ignored and turned on its head and it’s all about pointing blame at people and finding athletes that are doping”.
“We can do an appeal in 24 hours, so anything is possible”, Matthieu Reeb, secretary-general of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), told Reuters when asked if there was enough time for other athletes to have their ban overturned in time to compete in Rio. This amounts to political discrimination in direct violation of the Olympic Charter and was nowhere mentioned in the IOC’s decision.
According to him, Russian Federation has to work towards removing all doubts and becoming the leader in fighting doping.
Pound, the first president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), declared himself “hugely disappointed by the IOC’s lack of resolve in dealing with proven government-sponsored cheating”.
A change.org petition requesting the International Olympic Committee let Stepanova compete has more than 253,000 signatures. Sarah Konrad, the chair of the USOC athletes’ advisory council, told The Associated Press, “I think the International Olympic Committee made the wrong decision”. David, for all of my career I ran informants and whistleblowers, and every time I had to determine what their motivation was for cooperating. They had to leave everything, not just careers but their home, to hide in the U.S. Their sole motive is to allow future Russian athletes be able to compete without doping if they don’t want to.
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Given that the Russian drug abuse was state-orchestrated, “there should have been a decision against the system, and not against individuals”, said Prokop. Hollande is promoting the Paris bid for the 2024 Olympics.
