Bach wants life bans for proven Russian cheats
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 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 three-day 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 today 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.”
Bach did note that 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 that individual 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.
In his interim report in July, McLaren confirmed claims by former lab director Grigory Rodchenkov of a hole-in-thewall swapping system aided by the FSB security agency to exchange athletes’ dirty urine samples for clean ones.
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 on the sidelines of 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?”