The 22 “are not at all considered to have participated in doping, but do not meet the conditions established by the IOC in their decision of 24 July 2016 for participation in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games”, the federation said.
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Bach said the “nuclear option” of a blanket ban was unacceptable. “The result is death and devastation”. And Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is a sports powerhouse, a huge country seeking to reaffirm its status on the world stage, and a major player in the Olympic movement.
“If proven true, such a contemptuous system of doping is an unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games”, Bach said.
“What is not acceptable is the insinuation of some proponents of the blanket ban that those who do not share their opinions are not fighting against doping”, Bach said.
Russian government’s suspected wrongdoings in the sphere of doping in sports were the cause for the IOC Executive Board to revise the principle of the presumption of innocence in regard to Russian athletes, Bach added.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport’s ad hoc division has already registered 11 appeals – predominantly involving Russian athletes excluded from the Olympics amid allegations of state-sponsored doping – in seven days since setting up in Rio de Janeiro, the same number it handled in the entire period of the last Summer Games in 2012.
Russian Federation has been at the centre of a new doping scandal after an independent investigator, Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, said in a report that there had been widespread state-backed doping in Russian Federation.
“It is not the International Olympic Committee that is responsible for the accreditation and supervision of anti-doping laboratories”, he said.
WADA president Craig Reedie, who is a vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and was sitting close to Bach during his address, chose not to give an immediate response to the comments.
This is not the first discord between the International Olympic Committee and WADA even though Reedie is also a long-time International Olympic Committee member.
“While it is destabilising in the lead-up to the Games, it is obvious, given the seriousness of the revelations that he uncovered, that they had to be published and acted upon without delay”.
Argentine member Gerardo Werthein also laid into WADA, saying “the failure to investigate serious and credible allegations more swiftly has left the sports movement…in a very hard position facing incredibly hard decisions in an impossible timeframe”.
“At times WADA has seemed to be more interested in publicity and self-promotion rather than doing its job as a regulator”. “And it’s not just Russian Federation, it’s global”.
“We need full dialogue with members”.
But former WADA chief Dick Pound said the International Olympic Committee was “trying to deflect attention away from the reality” of the troublesome Russian situation.
“We need to do a lot more to show that we really do care about fair play, honest competition and clean athletes”, he said.
Most IOC members endorsed Bach and the decisions, and only one member then did not vote in favour of Bach and the decisions.
“One has to scratch his head if WADA says they did not know what to do with whistleblowers who came to them with clear information and just left it. So whistleblowers had to go somewhere”.
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Fencing, triathlon and volleyball join archery, badminton, equestrian, judo, shooting and tennis in approving all of Russia’s proposed athletes for the Rio Games, which start on August 5.
