Forty-five athletes have failed dope tests after their samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Games were reanalysed, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said yesterday.
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“However, I am concerned and deeply saddened by the possibility that, in the event Russian athletes are banned from participating in the Olympics, persons not culpable would be punished as well as those who are guilty”.
Bach accepted that the decision “might not please everybody”.
Under IAAF Rules, Russian track and field athletes are ineligible to compete in global competitions unless they satisfy specific criteria.
The IOC has appeared to back the principle that worldwide sporting federations could clear individual athletes in case of a blanket ban but with just two weeks to go until Rio, time is slipping away.
The latest results bring the total number of athletes who tested positive for prohibited substances from the first and second waves of reanalysis to 98. I am sure that this will be done.
Around “80 per cent” of the Russian team regularly undergoes global testing of the kind specified in the IOC criteria, he adds.
It also rejected the application by Russian whistleblower Yulia Stepanova, the 800-meter runner and former doper who helped expose the doping scandal in her homeland, to compete under a neutral flag at the games.
Mutko says the country’s athletes who are banned from competing in next month’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro co…
He said his committee has received names of Russian Paralympic athletes associated with 35 “disappearing positive samples” from a Moscow anti-doping laboratory which were highlighted in WADA report.
Around 25 media are gathered at the front door of the IOC’s temporary premises in Lausanne, about 400 metres from the Olympic Museum.
As if economic sanctions and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on its doorstep weren’t enough, Russians now are facing the unthinkable prospect that their entire Olympic team could be banned from the Summer Games in Rio.
A coalition of 14 national anti-doping agencies sent a letter to Bach saying the IOC’s initial response did not meet his pledge of the “toughest sanctions available”.
Patrick Hickey, an Irish member of the IOC’s executive board, has been trying to persuade the Russian government to host the 2019 European Games in his other role as head of the European Olympic Committees.
Reporters from Brazilian, Chinese and Japanese broadcasters are among the group.
Russian Federation insisted Friday it expects to avoid a blanket ban from the International Olympic Committee on its competitors at the Rio Olympics despite its track and field squad losing an appeal over a suspension for state-sponsored doping.
A damning World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) report released last week alleged a complex system of subterfuge that involved Russia’s security services tampering with and altering sealed urine samples.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had warned that the affair could split the Olympic movement, bringing echoes of the 1980s when the United States led a political boycott of the Moscow Games of 1980 and the Soviet Union led an Eastern Bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later.
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The report produced by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren described extensive doping and cover-ups across a series of summer and winter Olympic sports and particularly at the Sochi Winter Olympics hosted by Russian Federation in 2014. Bach and others have spoken of a need to balance “individual justice” versus “collective punishment”.
