The Russian president added: “This is a blow to the entire sporting world and to the Olympic Games”.
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“The situation went beyond the legal field as well as common sense”, Putin told the audience, which included numerous banned athletes.
Putin continued by denouncing the IAAF as “s hort-sighted politicians” spoiling sport’s ability to bring people together.
“Today, as never before, we need to stay united and become a family”, the 40-year-old Tetyukhin said, ignoring what he called “provocations addressed at our team and our mighty country”.
The Kenyan team for the Rio Olympics consisting of over 60 athletes will pass the anti-doping tests without any problem, the country’s Olympic boss said.
The Russian athletics federation has been banned from global competition since November and last week the Russian Olympic Committee failed in a bid to get this ban overturned at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. That inquiry also led to the suspension of Russia’s anti-doping agency and Moscow anti-doping laboratory.
With Russia months away from parliamentary elections and stuck in an economic crisis, the scandal, which centres on allegations the Russian government and the FSB security service covered up doping for years, has rocked the Russian sports world and tarnished Putin’s showcase 2014 winter Olympics.
While the nation’s fencing, volleyball, beach volleyball and gymnastics teams have all been cleared, new International Olympic Committee rules have resulted in bans for athletes who have previously doped.
Individual sports federations were given the task of deciding which athletes should be cleared to compete in Rio by the International Olympic Committee on Sunday.
Most of those sports have completed the process of individually vetting Russia’s team, with over 100 athletes from the initial 387 that were selected being declared ineligible.
The IAAF on Wednesday reaffirmed that only one Russian athlete – US-based long jumper Darya Klishina – was eligible to compete because she lives and trains outside the Russian system.
Putin blasted a decision to exclude the Russian track and field team and some other athletes as political and said it goes both “beyond the legal sphere and common sense”.
In a personal letter sent on Monday, Mutko said he agreed that the IAAF decision was “well-grounded and a outcome of a serious crisis in the management of the All-Russian Athletics Federation, as well as a deep-rooted doping problem that goes back to the Soviet times”.
He went on to assure Coe that Russia’s position ” remains unaltered and shows absolute zero tolerance to doping”, and that investigations and reforms were under way. “Voleyball player Sergei Tetyukhin, who is a great sportsman and an Olympic champion, will be given the honour”, Isinbayeva wrote on her Instagram page. “Clearly, the absence of Russian athletes who were leaders in some of the sports will affect the competition”.
The letter, however, got short shrift from the IAAF.
Furthermore, under the authority of the FIE and overseen by PWC, 24 Russian fencers, including the 16 who had qualified for Rio, were tested during the 2016 European Championships in Torun, Poland, June 20-25.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), sport’s highest court, upheld that decision last week.
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“In a training camp in Portugal, our athletes simply lived under false names”, said Stepanova, “They have taken banned substances, they undertook a course of doping, and to ensure that foreign control officers did not come and test them, they provided false names”. “There are no grounds for further review”.
