The IAAF upheld its ban on Russia’s track and field team for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics on Friday in a landmark decision that punishes the world power for systematic doping.
Advertisement
The team was first banned previous year after a 325-page report from the World Anti-Doping Agency detailed a state-sponsored doping program.
Coe, himself the target of allegations that he enlisted the help of the fugitive son of disgraced predecessor Lamine Diack to secure his election previous year, is to give a press conference at the Grand Hotel Wien at 1500 GMT.
“We firmly believe that clean athletes should not be punished for the actions of others”, he said in an open letter to IAAF President Sebastian Coe.
“There can not be collective responsibility of all athletes”, Mr Putin said. Younger, who was a member of WADA’s Independent Commission that investigated allegations of widespread doping in Russian athletics, will be responsible for leading WADA’s growing investigations activity.
And also “subject to other, effective anti-doping systems, including effective drug-testing”.
“And if someone tries to politicise something in this field, I think this is a big mistake”. The IOC’s president, Thomas Bach, has emphasized in recent weeks “the hard decision between collective responsibility and individual justice”, suggesting the possibility that the IOC can allow Russian athletes with clean histories to make it to Rio.
“In light of our efforts, I urge you to reconsider the ban on our athletes”.
“Russia has done everything that IAAF independent commission has rightly asked of us in order to be reinstated to athletic competition”, he wrote.
Russia, an athletics superpower, had lobbied furiously to avert the prospect of a Summer Olympics taking place without its track and field athletes.
Despite Mutko’s proclamations on Friday that Russian Federation was working hard in the fight against doping, WADA’s latest damning report, released on Wednesday, casts doubt over the likelihood of Russia’s immediate reinclusion.
Wada said officials in Russian Federation were being stopped from testing athletes and threatened by security services. A total of 736 tests were declined or canceled as doping control officers have seen athletes avoid them or pull out of competition.
– International Olympic Committee compromise to save face?
The International Olympic Committee will have final say on the matter when it convenes on Tuesday, June 21, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Separately, Coe could face questions following allegations by the BBC and Daily Mail that he was aware of details of a Russian doping corruption case four months before it became public, and enlisted support for his presidential campaign from a key figure in the sport’s current doping scandal.
A taskforce has been studying the Russian reforms but a fresh World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report, issued on Wednesday, made more damaging claims.
Since then, however, Russian officials have striven to persuade global decision-makers that they can be trusted in Olympic competition, volunteering to go beyond standard eligibility requirements and to send only athletes who have not been disciplined for drug use.
Former biathlete Alexander Tikhonov called it “the most incompetent decision in the history of world sport”.
Advertisement
“Because the system in Russian Federation has been tainted by doping from top level and down, we can not trust that what we call and what people might call clean athletes really are clean”, said Rune Andersen, head of the task force that provided recommendations to the IAAF.
