Russia loses appeal against track and field ban

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Thursday rejected the Russian Olympic Committee’s appeal against the ban on its athletes from track and field competitions at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Russian Federation is now on the brink of an outright ban from the Rio Olympics after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) this morning dismissed the appeal by their track and field athletes against their exclusion, as imposed by the IAAF last month.

CAS issued the verdict on Thursday in the case of the athletes who had sought to overturn the ban imposed by the governing body of world athletics, the IAAF, following allegations of state-sponsored doping and cover-ups.

That IAAF decision said that the state encouragement of doping in Russian sport was so extensive that no Russian track and field athletes could be permitted to compete at Rio, except for those able to meet strict criteria that proved they were clean.

IAAF president Lord Coe added: “This is not a day for triumphant statements”.

The latter organization oversees Olympic track and field competitions, and in 2015 suspended Russian athletes competing in the sport from global competition.

Coe stressed that post-Rio, the IAAF would continue to engage with Russia in its fight against doping “to establish a clean safe environment for its athletes so that its federation and team can return to worldwide recognition and competition”.

Understandably, Russia was unhappy about the decision and said, “The idea of collective responsibility from our point of view can hardly be considered acceptable”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

The list includes Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko.

While most Russian athletes train in their home country, both Darya Klishina and Yuliya Stepanova have been approved to compete at Rio as they train in the United States.

The IOC also started disciplinary action against Russian sports ministry officials and others implicated in McLaren’s Report, and said they would be denied accreditation for the Rio Games.

Gregory Ionanndis, a lawyer at CAS, also expressed concern about the assumption all Russian athletes may be guilty of doping.

The IPC’s board is meeting tomorrow and is understood to be less reluctant than the International Olympic Committee to consider such a radical and unprecedented step as throwing an entire country out for doping.

IOC president Thomas Bach called Russia’s actions a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of the sport and on the Olympic Games”.

The court stressed the decision is not binding on the International Olympic Committee, which has the final say as the supreme organizer of the Games.

The 2018 World Cup in Russian Federation has come under yet more scrutiny after sports minister Vitaly Mutko, the tournament’s ultimate supremo, was barred by the International Olympic Committee from attending the forthcoming Rio Games after the damning revelations of a state-run doping system.

As it stands, the IAAF has approved just two Russians to compete, as “neutral athletes”, after they showed they had been training and living overseas under a robust drug-testing regime. Letting Russian athletes compete in the Games would undermine the credibility of the competition, according to the IAAF.

Fahey told AP on Thursday that Russian Federation should “definitely not be going” to Rio, adding “this is widespread corruption, not individual, not a group, not one sport”.

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Other Russian athletes will be able to participate in the Olympics if they meet several conditions, the main being that their anti-doping tests were done overseas.