Klishina attended Sunday’s hearing in person at the court’s temporary base at a beachfront hotel in Rio then trained near the Olympic Stadium on Sunday night while awaiting the court’s decision.
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So Russia will have one track and field athlete competing in Rio after all.
But in a decision released in the early hours of Monday morning local time in Rio, CAS upheld Klishina’s appeal and said she could compete.
The lone Russian track and field athlete at the Olympics has won her appeal to compete at the Rio de Janeiro Games.
This method of manipulating drug tests was identified in last month’s explosive report into Russia’s state-run doping programme by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren.
Unlike in previous legal battles over Russian doping, the Russian Sports Ministry and the country’s Olympic committee have taken a back seat in Klishina’s case, with her American management company IMG in a leading role. She proved to be clean for competitions, the only (Russian) track-and-field athlete to meet the IAAF competition criteria.
“The athlete established that she was subject to fully compliant drug testing, in and out of competition, outside of Russia”, CAS said in a statement.
But on Friday the IAAF suspended her after undisclosed information about her doping record emerged.
Her lawyers have argued that no evidence had been presented, only that McLaren had told the IAAF about the sample bottles which reportedly had scratch marks on them.
Russian Federation had seized on the new ban on Klishina to reinforce its claim that it is the target of a campaign.
This led to calls for Russian Federation to be banned completely from the Rio showpiece. “Some provocative moments are premeditated”.
Russian officials celebrated the CAS ruling as an important victory.
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Ahead of the Games, the IAAF had ruled the 25-year-old, who is based in the United States, was not involved in the doping programme and had been subject to sufficient drug tests outside of Russian Federation. “The parties were informed that the application was upheld and that the athlete remained eligible to compete in the Olympic Games in Rio”, the CAS statement read, reports Xinhua news agency.
