In light of the report, IOC president Thomas Bach said: “The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games. It is all about friendship, cooperation and should strengthen relations between nations”.
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The IOC has said that they will wait until the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) delivers its verdict on Thursday before making any decision.
Makhov concluded that Russia’s involvement in the 2016 Olympic Games (over 400 athletes) ensures that those who medal in the tournaments have beaten the best opposition available on an global scale.
WADA has subsequently urged a total ban on Russian athletes competing in the Olympics. Russian Federation plans to send a total of 387 athletes, including 68 in track and field, he said.
The Dagestan native and member of the proposed Russian freestyle wrestling team at this year’s Olympics is referencing the World Anti-Doping Agency’s suggested ban on all Russian athletes from Olympic competition following a report revealed state-level corruption in the doping control process.
If the IAAF ban is thrown out and the Russian track athletes are let back in, that would seemingly rule out the International Olympic Committee imposing a blanket ban.
Peskov also said that Russian Federation is ready to consider the opinion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), but its report accusing Russian Federation of running an athletes’ doping probe coverup uses evidence provided by a “dubious” and “compromised” source.
Regardless of how the various doping-related cases turn out, Zhukov said a Russian Olympic boycott was out of the question.
All this would seem to suggest that the sports themselves are lining up behind the IOC’s pre-report stance that decisions on Russian eligibility for Rio are a matter for them, on a sport-by-sport basis, with a clear mechanism for allowing provably clean Russian athletes to compete.
“It was a government-instituted programme and every doping test was scanned to make sure there wasn’t a positive – and if it happened to be a Russian athlete who had a positive test, it disappeared and it was replaced by a negative test”. The International Association of Athletics Federations upheld the ban last month, a decision accepted by the IOC.
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For their part, the Russians have reacted to the McLaren report with the same mixture of anger, defiance and qualified acceptance that greeted earlier incriminating reports by Richard Pound, an IAAF task force and UK Anti-Doping, which is now overseeing drug-testing in Russia on behalf of WADA.
