Bach would like to ban cheaters for life
IOC president says proving athletes were aware of systemic doping at state level will be tough
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Russian athletes and officials who are proven to have been part of a doping “manipulation system” should be banned for life from the Olympics, IOC President Thomas Bach said Thursday.
Bach gave his personal view one day before Canadian investigator Richard McLaren publishes a final report into alleged state-backed cheating at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Proof of systematic doping would be “aggravated circumstances” to justify life bans, the IOC leader said at a news conference after a threeday executive board meeting.
“I would not like to see this person again at any Olympic Games in any function,” said Bach, who declined to speculate if fresh revelations Friday could lead to calls for Russia’s exclusion from the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games. “I do not know the content and the scope of the report of Professor McLaren.”
In his interim report in July, McLaren confirmed claims by former lab director Grigory Rodchenkov of a hole-in-the-wall swapping system aided by the FSB security agency to exchange athletes’ dirty urine samples for clean ones.
Bach said as an IOC disciplinary commission chairman, he approved life bans for Austrian team members implicated in a doping program at the 2006 Turin Winter Games.
However, proving athletes knew of systematic doping involving state agencies could be difficult.
McLaren, who was appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency in May, is expected to give more detail about cheating operations at the Sochi laboratory.
Earlier Thursday, the IOC member appointed to oversee disciplinary cases that arise from McLaren’s evidence acknowledged they could be tough to prove.
“Can you prove (athletes) were aware?” Denis Oswald said at a sports law conference in Geneva.
“It is not that we would be scared to attack high level people in the Russian regime,” the Swiss lawyer said. “The question is more on the legal point of view. Can you punish athletes if they have done nothing and whether they were not aware of what was happening?”
Bach has also appointed a second IOC commission, headed by former Switzerland president Samuel Schmid, to evaluate if McLaren’s report and evidence proves a staterun doping system.
“And then based on that we will see if we can start cases against athletes,” Oswald said.
Oswald spent several months disqualifying dozens of athletes — mostly from Russia and former Soviet Union countries — from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Olympics. Their use of anabolic steroids was detected in re-tests of samples.
He acknowledged it was “easy to see the link” in claims that Russian authorities approved a doping program for the home Olympics at Sochi after the team’s poor performance at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.