The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said the International Olympic Committee was wrong to ban Russian athletes who had previously been sanctioned from competing at Rio, saying the move was “unenforceable”.
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“The current exclusion of athletes is based on the eligibility criteria first outlined by the IOC on 24 July with respect to the Olympic Games”.
But when Fina issued a list of seven Russian swimmers banned in the wake of the damning McLaren Report on state-backed doping in Russia, Efimova’s name was on it.
All 11 Russian boxers who qualified for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics have been given the all clear to compete at the Games following confirmation from the IOC, the International Boxing Association (AIBA) said on Thursday.
Russia’s Olympic team will be the “cleanest” at the Rio Games, Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov says.
“The Russian team may have experienced the toughest checks of the Olympics, because they had to go through multiple tests and checked”, he added. The majority of the rejected athletes are subject to the International Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) nearly complete exclusion of Russian athletes.
They will be joined by eight Russian tennis players, 18 shooters, 11 judokas and Russian golfer Maria Verchenova, the sports’ global federations said.
Bach has faced much criticism over the past few weeks due to his unpopular decision to not ban the entire Russian team over their recent doping scandal. “I can say no team here has been checked as closely as Russian Federation”.
Global sport authorities had placed the bans on the athletes within their sport and the sports court upheld those decisions this week.
That number could still grow, though, as several Russian athletes have appealed against their exclusion from the assessment process because of previous doping convictions.
Earlier CAS, which has set up two branches in Rio, passed a similar ruling on the rowers Ivan Podshivalov and Anastasia Karabelshchikova. No matter that this resulted from a system that put pressure on her to dope, and that she had the courage to speak out against it later, at tremendous risk to her career – and, in Vladimir Putin’s police state, her life.
“Thomas has spoken about the concept of individual justice versus collective responsibility – it’s what our United States Constitution is all about”, Probst said “It’s not the flawless solution, but I think it’s the best solution that could have been arrived at given the information and facts that were available”.
The IOC president said that with that step of respect for nature justice, they also send an optimistic note to clean athletes in Russian Federation that they can be successful exterior such a system.
IOC President Thomas Bach again defended the decision not to ban the entire Russian Olympic team, insisting that athletes can not be punished for the wrongdoing of their government.
Meanwhile, the men’s soccer competition got underway a day before the Gmanes’ official opening.
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In Rio, Portugal defeated two-time Olympic champion Argentina 2-0 and Honduras edged Algeria 3-2 in Group D action.
