The IOC has said that a three-person panel will decide which Russian athletes can compete in Rio after a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accused Russia of state-sponsored doping, Xinhua news agency reported.
Advertisement
“We had to take the necessary decisions”, Bach said.
Bach rejected suggestions that the IOC’s response had been a failure, and took a shot at WADA for not having acted earlier based on whistleblower evidence of cheating in Russia, and for having accredited the Russian doping labs at the center of the scandal.
Despite evidence of a state-run doping program in Russia, the IOC board rejected calls for a total ban and left it to worldwide sports federations to decide on the entry of individual Russian athletes for the games, which open on Friday.
“I haven’t been talking to any Russian government official since the publication of the McLaren report and not even in the days or weeks preceding it”, he said.
He said the International Olympic Committee was neither responsible for the timing of the McLaren report, nor was it for WADA’s failure to act on the information regarding Russian doping it had received years ago.
“No. And this is for very obvious reasons”, he said. “In these hard decisions we will never have 100 percent majority”.
Several national anti-doping agencies and athletes groups had accused the International Olympic Committee of failing to show leadership at a crucial time.
The IOC then came under fire after it stopped short of banning Russian Federation completely from Rio, but instead left it to individual sports to take action against athletes from the country.
Bach said the decision taken this month to allow some Russians to compete was a hard one but had to be made under severe time constraints due to the start of the Games on August 5. “The integrity of the Olympic family is all under attack”, Zhukov said.The feud between the IOC and WADA came as the legal imbroglio triggered by the Russian scandal continued to dog the build-up to the games.
Speaking at a news conference five days before the opening of the games, Bach said a total ban on Russian Federation “would not be justifiable” on either moral or legal grounds.
Bach said McLaren report was to “reveal a system” and the International Olympic Committee faced a much more hard situation on how far they could go to punish an individual athlete for “the failures and munipulation of the government”.
“The IOC report isn’t responsible for the fact that the information, which was presented to WADA several years ago, did not lead to any action”.
Volleyball’s world governing body FIVB said that Russian athletes had been tested at the same level as all other countries and the majority of the testing had been conducted outside of Russia clearing the way for the both the men’s and women’s indoor and beach volleyball teams compete in Brazil.
But Bach insisted that the organisation of the Games is “coming together”.
In parallel, there have been recriminations over who is to blame for the huge doping controversy revealed in a Geman television documentary in 2014 and now casting a shadow over the Rio Games.
Advertisement
“We have the expectation that we’re going to have great Games, although, as always, we’ll have some last-minute challenges”.
