Worldwide sports federations must now remove any athlete previously banned for doping or who was implicated in last week’s McLaren report alleging a mass cover-up of failed drug tests.
Advertisement
More than 100 athletes from what was originally a 387-strong team have been barred from competing in Rio by global sports federations under sanctions which most Russian athletes consider unfair.
Rio de janeiro: Six weightlifting medallists from the 2012 London Olympics, including three Russians, have tested positive for doping after their samples were re-examined, the sport’s ruling body said.
The International Olympic Committee has set up a special unit to monitor any illegal betting, match-fixing or other illegal activity during the games in Rio de Janeiro.
Earlier in the day, dozens of Russian competitors in other sports flew off to Brazil after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) resisted a blanket ban against the country.
The IWF also referenced the 100-page report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which found state complicity in a scheme to cover up Russian athletes who used performance-enhancing drugs.
If you’ve been paying attention to all things Olympics lately, you’ve probably seen the headlines about how any athletes competing in sports that require them to go in the water should keep their mouths shut.
Russian Federation will also be confident of receiving clearance for its 20-strong gymnastics team – another sport that delivered handsomely in London with 12 medals, three of them gold.
The head coach Yuriy Borzakovskyi, a former Olympic gold medalist who was appointed a year ago, said Russian track and field would continue to hold national and regional events on the same schedule.
Putin complained that the ban on the entire Russian track and field team was “indiscriminate” and “pure discrimination”.
“The [Russian Weightlifting] Federation will do everything in its power to rehabilitate us, but it is impossible to do it before the Olympics; there is no time to do anything”, Russian weightlifter Aleksey Lovchev told RT, commenting on the IWF decision. “They want to participate in the study, they want to learn the information”, Byington said. He says it’ll be a case of “let’s go for this Olympics, maybe not as successful as it could have been, but the next one we’ll be back and we’ll be running the same system”.
But it was the near-blanket ban by the IAAF that most riled the Russian Federation president.
Advertisement
Putin denounced the Lord Coe-led International Association of Athletics Federations as “short-sighted politicians”, accusing it of having “gone beyond legal boundaries as well as beyond the point of common sense” by banning 67 of the rogue nation’s 68-strong track-and-field squad from Rio.
