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Russian Federation will be cleanest team in Rio, says ROC chief

The Summer 2016 Olympics is scheduled to open August 5.

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The IOC approved the entry of 271 Russian athletes for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics on Thursday, meaning 70 percent of the country’s original team will compete in the games after the scandal over state-sponsored doping.

The International Judo Federation also stated that all Russian athletes who qualified for the Games will be able to compete.

Ukraine’s sports minister on Friday banned his Olympic team from talking to the Russian media while in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Games.

After this year’s allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia, the International Olympic Committee decided against a blanket ban for Russians in Rio, instead letting individual sports bodies decide their eligibility based on strict criteria, including that no athletes previously sanctioned for doping would be eligible to compete.

It is unclear whether she will be competing for the Russian team or as an independent athlete.

Some Ukrainian team members said the ruling was weighed against the Russians because the International Olympic Committee allowed USA athletes who had previously served time out for doping to compete in Rio.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport is still hearing some Russian cases so the number could rise.

Russian swimming great Alexander Popov also hit out at the track and field ban and levelled a personal attack on Britain’s Sebastian Coe, president of the IAAF. Only one athlete, USA -based long jumper Darya Klishina, was cleared by the IAAF because she had been regularly tested outside Russian Federation.

The runner helped expose state-backed doping in Russian sport and has fled the country, now living at a secret location in the United States.

“As a effect, the CAS panel found that this is unenforceable as it does not respect the athletes’ right of natural justice”.

Some athletes and antidoping officials, including Tygart, lobbied for what Thomas Bach, the committee’s president, called “the nuclear option” – excluding the whole country in recognition of its government’s role in cheating schemes that corrupted the results of recent Olympics.

Russian Olympic gold medal-winners said the team had been galvanised by the fall-out of revelations of state-orchestrated doping on a grand scale.

CAS rejected the athletes’ appeal to be granted direct entry into the games, saying it was now up to the global rowing and swimming federations to decide whether to let them in or not.

There were reports of widespread doping with the official connivance in #Russia, and the International Olympic Committee was expected to take a tough stand on the issue. It argued that the Osaka Rule amounted to double punishment for one offence. The IOC took a soft line and on Sunday ordered individual sports federations to decide whether Russian competitors could take part in the games.

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“For clean athletes, I think the situation in Rio is tough to watch”, said Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

Members of the Russian Olympic delegation line up to board a bus after arriving at the Rio de Janeiro International Airport