Russia, with places for 267 athletes across 18 sports, has the third largest delegation for the Rio Paralympics, behind China and Brazil.
Advertisement
(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File).
Commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, it looked into claims by Grigory Rodchenkov, the ex-head of Russia’s national anti-doping laboratory.
Ahead of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, the English Heritage charity launched a campaign Thursday for the ancient equestrian sport to be included on the program at future editions of the games.
Russian Federation made a last-ditch bid to avoid a blanket ban at the Rio Games over state-run doping as a fresh batch of drug test failures from Beijing 2008 and London 2012 rocked the Olympics.
Global federations, which in the case of swimming would be FINA, will be asked to “examine the personal merits of potential Russian athletes, to assess whether they can compete as exceptional cases”, the Daily Mail continued.
At midday (BST) the International Olympics Committee’s executive board will discuss what to do next with Russian Federation. The chance that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will permit the Russian athletes to compete at the Rio Olympics is not higher than one percent, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko told a news conference on Saturday.
And there is set to be more bad news on the way with more samples from Beijing and London – specifically aimed at medal winners – set to be conducted throughout and beyond the Rio Games.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport earlier this week upheld the decision of athletics’ world governing body the IAAF to ban Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics due to widespread doping violations.
Russian Federation has denied any state involvement in the doping crisis. “Roughly the decision is between collective responsibility and individual justice”, he said, before making clear where his instincts lay.
The new commission should include, besides Russian specialists, foreign experts in the field of medicine and law, as well as prestigious public and sports figures, Putin said as quoted by a Kremlin transcript. “The IPC, British Athletics, WADA [the World Anti-Doping Agency] are all taking care of that”.
The sporting powerhouse’s absence would create biggest crisis in decades for the Olympic movement.
The IOC has appeared to back the principle that global 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.
Putin, citing the US and Soviet-led boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Games, said the Olympic movement “could once again find itself on the brink of a division”.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wrote an open letter to Bach on Friday to plead against a blanket ban. That said, Moscow can be expected to play the victim.
The IOC is facing worldwide pressure to act tough on Russian Federation and ban the entire team over incendiary revelations of a “state-run doping system”. The IOC did not say whether any were medalists. I want equal testing for every athlete. “They must show some proper guts by expelling the whole team – every sport”.
Advertisement
The report found that the Russian government, its sports authorities and security services conspired to hide doping at several major events – including the 2012 London Games -following a poor medal return at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
