The International Olympic Committee has left it to individual sports federations to decide if Russian teams should be allowed to participate in next month's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Russian officials will not be accredited at Rio 2016, and the track & field team is still barred.
26 July 2016
Six Russian athletes were provisionally confirmed as being allowed to take part in the 2016 Rio Olympics by the international World Sailing federation on Tuesday, the federation said in a statement on its website. The athletes include Stefania Elfutina, Maxim Oberemko, Lyudmila Dmitrieva, Alisa Kirilyuk, Sergey Komissarov, and Denis Gribanov. Pavel Sozykin was banned from the competition since his name was mentioned in the McLaren report. Since Sozykin was to compete in a two-person racing classification, the Russian Olympic Committee has recommended finding a substitute for the disqualified athlete.
The World Rowing Federation has only given six Russian rowers permission to participate in the 2016 Olympics, the federation said on Tuesday on its website. They include Aleksandr Chaukin, Georgy Efremenko, Artem Kosov, Nikita Morgachev, Vladislav Ryabcev, and Anton Zarutskiy. Seventeen others and two coxswains were denied access to the competition. As a result, Russia now has one lightweight and five open weight men to man its boats.
The International Canoe Federation has no complaints against the Russian Canoe Slalom Federation (RCSF), according to RCSF head Sergey Papush, as cited by R-Sport. Russian slalom athletes have already arrived to Rio de Janeiro and are training at the Olympic facilities there, he added.
24 July 2016
Two-time pole vault Olympic champion and world record holder, Yelena Isinbayeva, who will still miss the Olympics after IAAF announced its position, shared her emotions on Instagram.
“That’s it… The battle for Rio is over. I’ll never stand on the top of the Olympic podium again. The Russian anthem won’t be played in my honor. I won’t make my fans happy by my performance. Oh god, how bitter it is to face such injustice,” Isinbayeva wrote.
“What I could’ve given the world in Rio – what height, what emotions. It’ll will remain a mystery… for me as well… I want to cry,” she added.
Russian athletes will prove their class in Rio, Aleksey Vlasenko, vice president of Russia’s Diving Federation and head of Moscow’s Synchronized Swimming Federation said, after IOC refrained from banning the country from the upcoming Olympics.
“It’s hard to say how just and fair the IOC decision is because there are a lot of hidden riffs. But i’ts 1,000 percent obvious that its’ positive for us. In our federations, all of the divers and synchronized swimmers are admitted to the Olympic Games,” Vlasenko told RT.
“We’ll prove that we are the cleanest and the best in the world” at the Olympics in Brazil, he added.
One Western athlete has picked up the inconsistency that will see Russians who have served lengthy drug bans to be banned from Rio, while others having done the same will still be allowed. While the measure will help to reduce the mention of past doping in the TV coverage, it is hard to see what their violations have to do with the supposed doping cover-ups in Russian sports. After all, in the cases of the athletes who were punished, the system did work, at least to an extent.
The IAAF has no intention of overturning its decision to ban the entire Russian team, its representatives told TASS. Earlier, Russia's athletics head Mikhail Butov expressed hope that the federation would undertake a new assessment of Russia's team in the wake of the IOC statement. The IOC statement mentioned that the athletics decision has already been enforced, and said its delegation to the federations to allow entry would only concern those federations that had not already ruled on Russia.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has been one of the first to give its preliminary go-ahead for the Russian team to participate in the games, issuing this press release.
"The eight Russian tennis players who have been nominated to compete in Rio have been subject to a rigorous anti-doping testing programme outside Russia, which included:
- A total of 205 samples collected since 2014, of which;
- 83 (40%) were collected In-Competition and 122 (60%) Out-of-Competition;
- 111 (54%) were urine samples and 94 (45%) were blood samples."
In what may be an error, or a badly-worded sentence, the ITF goes on to say that "it believes that this is sufficient for the seven Russian tennis players to meet the relevant requirement of today’s decision of the IOC Executive Board.
The ITF will also be seeking confirmation from WADA that none of those players, or the Russian Tennis Federation, were implicated in the McLaren report, in accordance with the IOC decision."
After Maria Sharapova was forced to withdraw from the team, it now contains three men and five women, none of whom are currently under any doping sanctions.
Sebastian Coe, who heads the IAAF, which has already banned the entire Russian team, says he is prepared to share the information gathered during the investigation, to help other federations make their decision, with less than a fortnight to go.
"I'm just sad that the IOC have passed the buck, as they so often do, down to the governing bodies, and I don't think the governing bodies have the time to be able to do very much about this," says Sharron Davies, the popular UK Olympic swimmer told the BBC. "I think the only way to send an incredibly strong message to a state-run doping program is a blanket ban."
Other UK Olympians have also taken to Twitter to trash the decision.
Michele Verroken, who was a key figure in setting up the UK's anti-drugs policy, and remains an independent sports ethics expert, has called the IOC move a "poor decision."
"The IOC didn't want to offend anybody, and didn't want any boycotts. The decision is not very clear for Russian athletes, and not very helpful for other athletes. It's a bit of a fudge," she told RT in a broadband link interview from the UK.
A reporter from the UK newspaper, The Times, which organized a petition signed by UK sportsmen and officials asked Bach at the news conference that followed about what his decision meant, after the Russians "were laughing at the world" with their alleged cheating at Sochi.
Bach said he was aware of the petition, and that its authors are disappointed, but insisted that the IOC verdict was made to "protect clean athletes."
A fuller statement from the UK Sports Minister Tracey Crouch, calling for "stronger sanctions" against Russia.
Irina Viner-Usmanova, who heads the Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation, and has been touted by the Russian media as a potential replacement for sports minister Mutko has thanked the IOC for a "wise" decision, and personally praised Bach, who she said is a "true sportsperson, who understands what it's like to train and then not be allowed to perform."
Gennady Aleshin, the Chairman of the Interim Coordination Committee (ICC) at the ROC applauds the verdict, telling the media that "the IOC decision is predictable, as Russia is not the kind of state that can be treated with disregard for the rules."
The UK, another country pushing for Russia's exclusion, is also disappointed by the IOC decision.
The US Anti-Doping Agency, which was lobbying hard for a blanket ban, has released a statement criticizing the IOC decision.
Speaking to journalists after the IOC session, ROC head Aleksandr Zhukov invited foreign agencies to help place "insurmountable barriers" for future competition participation for cheating athletes.
Zhukov also elaborated on the interaction between the IOC and CAS in ruling on which Russian teams should go to Rio. A dedicated CAS official will be assigned who will evaluate the decisions of the various sports federations on Russia, and "make sure they comply with the declarations of the IOC."
Russia's Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko says the IOC has made a "considered" decision "in the interests of international sport."
"Most federations have no issues with Russian athletes," he told journalists outside the meeting hall in Lausanne.
The minister insisted that "tough criteria" had been set for Russian athletes to prove they are clean, with just weeks to go before the opening ceremony in Rio, but expressed hope that they "would rise to the challenge."
Mutko insisted that Russia "will not cover up for cheats," and said that there are no "fly-by-night" Russian athletes who produce suspiciously good results out of the blue, only to disappear again.
Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) chief Aleksandr Zhukov has called for a "zero tolerance" approach to doping among Russian athletes, in a speech to the IOC. He has called for the ROC to take a leading role in anti-doping controls in the country, and says those who have violated the rules "must suffer severe punishments."
Zhukov also said that demands from US, Canadian and other doping agencies to ban Russia ahead of the publication of the McLaren report showed that "the issue had gone beyond sport." The Russian official, who was a key figure in organizing the Sochi Olympics, called for the members to "not fall hostage to geopolitical pressure" when deciding whether individual Russian teams should gain access to Rio.
Yelena Dyachkova, who heads Russia's handball federation, says that there is "no doubt" that the country's handball teams will be allowed to play at Rio.
Bach had explained the mechanism that will be used to decide the participation of Russia's teams in various sports at the Games.
Any federation in a particular sport will voice its verdict, whether to ban Russia, which will then be sent to the IOC. The Lausanne-based body will then evaluate the decision, with the help of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the legal organization that resolves sporting disputes.
Bach said that he hoped that most of the federations have already made up their mind on Russia's responsibility.
Russia's Olympic gold-winning pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva praised the IOC decision.
"To exclude the entire Russian team would have been a huge mistake, and the IOC understood its scale - it would have been an international scandal, and the IOC doesn't need that," she told TASS.
In a televised address following the publication of the decision, IOC head Thomas Bach said that the decision to eschew a blanket ban would serve as encouragement to Russian athletes to prove that they are clean.
Bach also said that the IOC decision on Russia was almost unanimous.
No members of Russia's sports ministry will be accredited for the upcoming Olympics in Rio, the IOC has announced. Earlier it was known that Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, directly implicated in alleged manipulation of doping samples, had been denied a place in Rio.
The IOC has rejected the plea of Yulia Stepanova, the Russian runner who provided much of the testimony about the country's alleged doping machinery, to participate in Rio 2016 as a neutral athlete.
The committee thanked her for her revelations, but "put this contribution into the perspective of Mrs Stepanova’s own long implication, of at least five years, in this doping system and the timing of her whistle-blowing, which came after the system did not protect her any longer following a positive test for which she was sanctioned for doping for the first time."
"The sanction to which she was subject and the circumstances in which she denounced the doping practices which she had used herself, do not satisfy the ethical requirements for an athlete to enter the Olympic Games,” said a statement on the IOC website.
Facing calls for a blanket ban on all Russian athletes for the games, the International Olympic Committee ruled that the decision on whether or not Russian athletes can compete at the Rio Games should be made by international federations in individual sports.
The head of Russian Olympic Committee Aleksandr Zhukov is present at the IOC building in Lausanne, where an executive conference is underway to take the decision.
Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer who conducted a probe into doping allegations against Russia on WADA’s behalf, said he didn’t seek input from any individual living in Russia, citing a lack of time and the abundance of evidence he obtained.
The report is based on the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, the former chief of a Russian anti-doping laboratory. McLaren said in the report he also talked to other unidentified witnesses and studied electronic and print documents as well as doping lab samples.
Two-time Olympic freestyle wrestling champion Arsen Fadzayev said that he was ready to return his gold medals if the Russian team gets a blanket ban from the Olympic Games from Rio de Janeiro.
“It’s not that I want to return them or doing a political move here. I want to show that this is not the way to go,” he said.
While some international athletes and sports organizations supported the call to ban Russia from the Olympics, others expressed support for Russian athletes and criticized the suggested collective punishment.
The biggest damage from the doping scandal so far was to Russian athletes, many of whom have long records of competing and winning fairly.
“Let the ‘clean’ athletes breathe a sigh of relief and win their pseudo-gold medals in our absence. People always feared strength,” legendary pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, one of the athletes affected, commented on the CAS rejection.
Being banned from Rio for Isinbayeva personally means abandoning a dream of becoming a three-time Olympic gold medalist in her discipline. She became the public face of what many in Russia see as a witch hunt that has nothing to do with sports.
A host of British officials, athletes and politicians have called on the IOC to ban Russia from the Rio Games, citing WADA’s doping report. Almost 70 people signed the open letter to the committee organized by the Times newspaper.
“The letter will intensify the pressure on the IOC after revelations of rampant, state-organized doping. The Times can also reveal that Russian athletes are among the 45 new cases of positive findings from retesting of London 2012 and Beijing 2008 samples using new techniques,” the letter said. “We have seen medals stolen from clean athletes from Britain.”