A new study known as the McLaren Report was released this week and alleged that Russia’s Sports Minister was involved with manipulating the anti-doping measures.
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Bolt’s appearance at the Olympic Stadium, the scene of his three Olympic gold medal wins at London 2012 in the 100m, 200m and sprint relay, will be his last before this summer’s Games in Brazil, where he will bid for an unprecedented “triple triple” of Olympic crowns.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected the appeal of 68 Russian athletes seeking to overturn the ban imposed by the IAAF following allegations of state-sponsored doping and cover-ups.
The Jamaican was responding to the decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to uphold the ban on 68 Russian track and field athletes made by athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, but he refused to be drawn on whether the entire Russian team should be banned from Rio.
Former World Anti-Doping Agency president John Fahey said if Russian Federation is allowed to attend the Olympics then at every event at which one of its athletes competes there will be doubt over whether they were clean or a cheat.
The IOC executive is to hold more talks on Sunday and a decision on a ban could be announced after, an Olympic spokesperson said.
“In mid-June, the WADA took another look and again found more of the same, leading the IAAF to issue a unanimous decision banning Russian track and field athletes from competing in global competitions, saying the testing system was ‘tainted by doping from the top level and down'”.
A decision on banning Russian Federation from the Rio Games, which start on August 5, could come this weekend and Jamaican star Bolt, a six-time Olympic champion, has no doubt a strong stance is the right response as athletics tries to clean up its act.
But he concedes the International Olympic Committee might find there’s no other option but to kick the entire Russian team out of Rio following the damning report which revealed systematic, state-backed drug cheating between 2011 and 2015. “In the opinion of CAS, because the national federation is suspended, normally these athletes should not compete in Rio, but the International Olympic Committee was not a party in these conversations and our decision is not binding on the International Olympic Committee”. “It is our federation’s instinctive desire to include, not exclude”.
The International Olympic Committee says: “We will now have to study and analyze the full decision”.
Two of those medallists – Irina Meleshina and Tatyana Kotova – later served doping bans, although they kept their 2004 Olympic medals.
ARAF president Dmitry Shlyakhtin told TASS that Russian athletes have lost all chances of participating in the Olympics after Thursday’s ruling.
The exclusion of Russian athletes from Rio sees Shubenkov become the second member of his family to miss out on a chance of Olympic glory.
Long jumper Darya Klishina was exempted from the ban by the IAAF because she lives and trains in Florida at an academy run by sports marketing company IMG and has been tested for years by the USA anti-doping agency, not Russia’s scandal-hit equivalent.
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The Russian appeal was heard by a CAS panel on Tuesday.
