Russia’s Sport Minister Vitaly Mutko has said he is “grateful” to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for not imposing a blanket ban on Russian Federation competing at the Rio Olympics. “The decision was reached after hard debates”, but it allows clean Russian athletes to prove their rights to compete in Rio, he said. It issued a tricky “guilty until proven innocent” type of condition to the Russians.
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Seeking to justify Sunday’s decision, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said an outright ban would trample the rights of clean Russian athletes who are hoping to compete at the upcoming Games.
IOC President Thomas Bach has defended the decision not to ban all Russians from the Olympics by insisting clean athletes should not be punished.
The IOC executive said it would “like to express its appreciation for Mrs Stepanova’s contribution to the fight against doping and to the integrity of sport”.
The Russian authorities have withdrawn Mikhail Dovgalyuk, Yulia Efimova, Natalia Lovtcova and open-water swimmer Anastasia Krapivina from consideration as all have served doping bans before.
The FSB is Russia’s federal security service, while the CSP is involved in the training of Russian athletes.
“The seven Russian tennis players who have been nominated to compete in Rio have been subject to a rigorous anti-doping testing programme outside Russia, which included a total of 205 samples collected since 2014”.
That decision was upheld by the court of Arbitration for Sport on Thursday.
The IOC also delivered a crushing blow to Stepanova’s hopes of competing in Rio.
“The IOC had an opportunity to exercise leadership and they chose the easier path and pushed their responsibility over to the IFs (individual sports federations)”, he said.
Meanwhile, his agents were working late into the night at the Sochi doping lab, exchanging urine samples taken from the country’s athletes for clean ones in an elaborate scheme to escape detection.
WADA also blasted the IOC decision to give individual sports federations the prime responsibility to determine every Russian athletes eligibility stating it was a recipe for confusion. “While WADA director general Olivier Niggli said that while they fully respect the IOC’s autonomy to make decisions under the Olympic Charter, the approach taken and the criteria set forward will inevitably lead to a lack of harmonization, potential challenges and lesser protection for clean athletes”.
Revelations by the former drugs cheat and her husband helped expose the massive doping problem in her country.
“An athlete should not suffer and should not be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated”, Bach told reporters on a conference call after Sunday’s meeting. Stepanova, now living in the United States, competed as an individual athlete at last month’s European Championships in Amsterdam.
The International Handball Federation has written to the Russian Handball Federation to ask for the whereabouts of the women’s team to enable immediate drug-testing, while, boxing, gymnastics and modern pentathlon have told Press Association Sport that they are now assessing matters. “I’m sure that the majority of the Russian national team will be able to comply with the criteria”.
The federations might also consider each athlete’s case individually.
In 2011, a CAS panel declared invalid the IOC’s so-called “Osaka Rule”, which sought to bar athletes from the next Olympic Games if they served a ban for doping of at least six months. He feels hurt because numerous dubious activities continued even after Russia promised to cooperate after an earlier inquiry into doping in Russian athletics.
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During his presentation, Mr. Zhukov explained that the Russian Federation and the ROC guarantee full cooperation with all global organisations to shed light on the issue in every respect.
