Individual sports’ governing bodies will have to decide if Russian competitors are clean and able to take part.
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Olympic organisers have left the decision to ban Russian athletes, following the country’s doping scandal, to individual sports’ federations.
Russians who have already served a suspension for doping – such as swimmer Yulina Efimova – have also been banned but athletes from other countries with prior indiscretions will be allowed to compete in Brazil.
The IOC said it would accept the entry only of those Russian athletes who meet certain conditions set out for the 28 global federations to apply.
The IOC’s decision, revealed on Sunday afternoon, means the individual federations have 12 days to review each athletes’ conduct on a case-by-case basis in a defining moment of president Thomas Bach’s tenure on the committee.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach and others have spoken of a need to balance “individual justice” versus “collective punishment”.
All this was carried out under the direction of the country’s sport authorities to cover up doping across a “vast majority” of winter and summer sports, the report stated, leading many to call for Russian Federation to be banned from the Rio Games, which begin August 5. That’s why it’s especially frightful that Russia’s Olympic doping spread even to sports where people with physical disabilities compete.
A World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) report released last week claimed a complex conspiracy by Russia’s security services working to tamper with and change sealed urine samples from its athletes.
But the International Olympic Committee board, meeting via teleconference, decided against the ultimate sanction, in line with Bach’s recent statements stressing the need to take individual justice into account.
“It will inevitably lead to a lack of harmonization, potential challenges and lesser protection for clean athletes”, said Wada director general Olivier Niggli. That means Russian tests can not be taken into consideration.
Bach acknowledged the decision “might not please everybody”.
The IOC rejected whistleblower, Yulia Stepanova’s bid to participate in the Rio games as a neutral athlete under a new regulation banning any Russian who has previously served a doping ban.
“An objective decision has been made as regards our country – it’s a just and fair decision and we hope every federation will take the same kind of decision”.
Although the IOC expressed gratitude for Stepanova’s actions in its statement, it added that “the circumstances in which she denounced the doping practices which she had used herself … do not satisfy the ethical requirements for an athlete to enter the Olympic Games”. However, the International Olympic Committee added that it would invite Stepanova and her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, a former Russian anti-doping official who also turned whistleblower, to attend the games.
WADA has confirmed that the names of those athletes implicated in McLaren’s Report have been passed over to the respective IFs.
It also recommended Russian officials be denied access to worldwide competitions, including Rio 2016. There we have set the bar to the absolute limit for how Russian athletes can achieve to compete in Rio.
It also ordered the immediate re-testing of all Russian athletes from the Sochi Olympics.
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The “Chef De Mission” of the Australian Olympic Team, Kitty Chiller, said the decision to allow Russian Federation to compete was the right one. The United States led a political boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games and the Soviet Union led an Eastern Bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later.
