Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko and Olympic medallist Olga Kaniskina support athletes during a track and field meet called “Stars of 2016” in Moscow on July 28, 2016.
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As the world’s finest athletes converge on Brazil for the 2016 Olympic Games, more than 50 members of Russia’s nearly entirely banned track-and-field team were among 150 competing at the much more modest Stars-2016 tournament.
Global sports federations must now remove any athlete previously banned for doping or who was implicated in a report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency that accused Russia of a mass cover-up of failed drug tests. “They disqualified us in the rudest way but we continue to compete”.
The exact numbers will depend on the court of arbitration for sport, who will scrutinise each Russian athlete passed by the worldwide federations in the coming days.
Earlier in the day, dozens of Russian competitors in other sports flew off to Brazil after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) resisted a blanket ban against the country.
The IWF says that the multiple cases of doping by Russian weightlifters have “seriously damaged” the integrity of the sport.
Australia’s Olympic chief says there’s no lingering discontent with Rio Olympic organisers over the athletes’ village shambles.
On Wednesday night, government employees angry over delayed salary payments took to the streets in Angra dos Reis, a city near Rio de Janeiro, and confronted the procession carrying one of the Olympic torches.
World champions competed against regional-level athletes in front of around 150 spectators in an event hastily organized after the track team’s ban was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last week.
Hammer thrower Sergey Litvinov last week wrote a letter to IAAF president Sebastian Coe saying that relying on the Russian athletics federation “does not make me optimistic”.
Also, Russia also looks set to field a full team of four players in Olympic badminton, the Russian Badminton Federation said Tuesday, citing assurances from the Badminton World Federation.
The 19 were excluded because World Rowing said they had not been tested often enough by reliable global authorities.
“What’s even more deplorable is that they didn’t go simply because of political games”, he added.
Also on Friday, Anatoly Terekhov, head of the Russian Taekwondo Union, told Russian agency R-Sport that all three Russians entered for taekwondo in Rio have been approved by the World Taekwondo Federation.
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United World Wrestling, the governing body for Olympic forms of wrestling, said on Thursday a special commission it set up had recommended that 16 of the 17 Russian wrestlers who qualified for the Rio Olympics should be allowed to take part.
