Putin met in the Kremlin with the national team, which will leave on Thursday for Rio de Janeiro to take part in the August 5-21 games and also those athletes, who were not allowed to participate. “We can not and will not accept what in fact is pure discrimination”.
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“They banned us without evidence, crudely and rudely”, she said, before the team headed to a religious ceremony to be blessed by the influential head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.
The Russian track and field team had already been barred from competing in Rio by the sport’s governing body, the IAAF.
Previously, on July 21, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) announced it had ruled against 68 Russian athletes in their appeal against an global athletics’ ban imposed on them by the worldwide Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
“We can’t accept indiscriminate disqualification of our athletes with an absolutely clean doping history”, Putin said. “We can not and will not accept what in fact is pure discrimination”.
The decision means that each sport’s worldwide federation is to decide whether Russian athletes can compete in their discipline.
As the athletes walked across Red Square to meet Putin, some posed for selfies with Vitality Mutko, whose sports ministry was accused by the World Anti-Doping Agency of orchestrating the doping program.
But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) left it up to individual sports federations to decide.
That’s long jumper Darya Klishina, who having trained in the USA was granted a reprieve by the IAAF earlier this month.
“The current situation does not only go beyond the legal sphere, it goes beyond common sense”, Putin said.
A host of problems have arisen with accommodation in the athlete’s village and Britain’s Olympic staff have retained the services of a local plumber who is required to react at short notice to resolve any issues that develop during the games, as revealed in The Times.
Russian competitors are set to jet out to Brazil early Thursday but it still remains unclear how numerous 387-strong squad named last week will eventually compete.
The International Judo Federation – which cleared all 11 Russian participants – is chaired by honorary president Putin. The decision came after the FIE said it had re-examined 197 tests taken from Russian fencers in 35 countries over the last two years which all came back negative.
The necessity of clearances from individual sports authorities came after the IOC refused to ban the entire Russian Olympic team, despite outcries from the global sporting community to do so after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirmed it found evidence of state-sponsored doping. These rulings must still be ratified by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The IOC specified that an athlete will only be accepted at the games if he or she has been subjected to reliable adequate worldwide doping tests, and the relevant global federation is satisfied that he or she is a clean athlete.
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According to the International Olympic Committee, women first competed in the modern Olympics in 1900, when they made up 22 of 997 athletes and competed in tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian events.
