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Rio 2016: Russian weightlifters barred from upcoming Olympics

On top of all of the Olympic village housing issues, officials are telling athletes to keep their mouths closed when in Rio de Janeiro’s water to avoid getting extremely sick.

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Last month, the IWF said its Executive Board had chose to suspend for a year national federations that produced three or more doping violations in re-tests from the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games – made possible by improved detection techniques.

Like every other federation in the summer Olympic programme, the UWW has been assessing each Russian athlete’s record in the wake of the devastating report into state-sponsored doping by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren.

In doing so, the federation pointed to the multiple cases of doping by the country’s weightlifters.

Individual decisions on Russian athletes will be taken by relevant worldwide federations.

To replace the eight Russian lifters, five countries were offered places in the men’s competition – Belarus, Croatia, El Salvador, Mongolia and Serbia. For the women, Albania, Georgia and Moldova became eligible.

The 19 were excluded because World Rowing said they had not been tested often enough by reliable worldwide authorities. “We did not want to penalise athletes who are clean with a collective ban and therefore keeping them out of the Games”.

Brazilian labour inspectors on Wednesday said they would fine the organizing committee almost US$100,000 (about 315,000 reals) for hiring workers without proper contracts required by law.

Brazilian officials arrested a man in Rio on terrorism charges yesterday and caught 12 others affiliated with what they have called an “amateur” Islamic State-linked group preparing attacks in the past week.

World Rowing’s approval process left just six rowers eligible to compete for Rio, meaning Russian Federation could only compete in one event, the men’s four, and meant reserve crews from around the world have rushed to Brazil to compete.

Russia’s head swim coach Sergei Kolmogorov told Russian agency R-Sport that swimmers barred from the games, including world 100-meter breaststroke champion Yulia Efimova, were at a pre-Olympic training camp in Brazil in the hope of a late reprieve to allow them to race in Rio.

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The coach, Alexander Kuznetsov, named his athletes in a letter to International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach, expressing his outrage at the ruling made – a letter seen by Russian news agency TASS.

FISA has banned another 17 Russian rowers from Rio 2016