Grigory Rodchenkov, the ex-director of Russia’s anti-doping agency RUSADA, told The New York Times on May 12 that he helped provide banned substances to athletes and replace drug-tainted testing samples with clean ones during the Sochi Olympics.
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In a statement, the IPC said: “The International Paralympic Committee would like to clarify that Friday’s IAAF decision does not affect the participation of Russian Para athletics team at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games”. Craig Reedie, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, indicated today he would be prepared to back “precedent-setting action” against Russian Federation following suggestions the country’s entire team could be banned from August’s Olympic Games in Rio. The championships should have been the qualifier to decide which athletes would go to the Olympics this summer, but instead they are now just a national event leaving the athletes who have trained so hard devastated.
Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer heading the independent probe, said Friday that his preliminary findings backed allegations that the Russian Sports Ministry was involved in manipulating test results before, during and after the IAAF world championships in Moscow in 2013.
The head coach of the Russian track federation, Yuri Borzakovsky, said the country had not yet given up on sending at least some of its athletes to Rio de Janeiro.
It’s unlikely the IOC would allow an admitted doper to compete under the Olympic flag, so another solution would have to be found.
But IAAF president Sebastian Coe, who won Olympic 1500 metres gold and 800m silver for Britain at the 1980 Moscow Games, wrote in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph: “We have not prevented clean athletes from Russia from competing, rather the Russian system has cataclysmically failed their clean athletes”.
But individual athletes can compete as neutrals if they prove they are clean.
“In short this is the price that has to be paid for the failure of the Russian authorities to fix the problem before now, and the Russian authorities alone are to blame for that”, said the panel, headed by Norwegian anti-doping expert Rune Andersen.
The IOC’s 16-member board, which includes president Thomas Bach, WADA president Sir Craig Reedie and CAS president John Coates added that the “eligibility of athletes in any global competition including the Olympic Games is a matter for the respective worldwide federation”.
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The IOC also said it would take “further far-reaching measures to ensure a level playing field” for all athletes taking part in the Rio Games and to emphasize its anti-doping posture.
