Olympic Committee dodges call on Russian doping
The International Olympic Committee won’t ban Russian athletes from competing at the Rio Olympics, despite revelations of widespread doping.
The IOC will instead leave it to each international sports federation to decide whether they would allow Russians to compete at the Games, which begin on August 5.
The decision came after a threehour meeting via teleconference of the IOC’s executive board.
‘‘We had to balance the collective responsibility and the individual justice to which every human being and athlete is entitled to,’’ IOC president Thomas Bach said.
The IOC rejected calls from the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) and dozens of other anti-doping bodies to exclude the entire Russian Olympic team following allegations of state-sponsored cheating.
In its decision, the IOC set out a series of requirements Russians must meet to gain accreditation.
No Russian athletes or officials implicated in last week’s explosive Wada report into the doping allegations would be accepted for entry or accreditation for the Games.
Any Russian athlete who had ever been sanctioned for doping would be allowed to compete, regardless of whether they had served out their sanction period.
The federations should ‘‘carry out an individual analysis of each athlete’s anti-doping record, taking into account only reliable adequate international tests, and the specificities of the athlete’s sport and its rules, in order to ensure a level playing field’’, the IOC said. It added that the absence of a positive drug test ‘‘cannot be considered sufficient’’ to prove they were clean.
International federations would have to seek information from Wada about each athlete and their national sport federation before deciding whether they could compete.
Russian track and field athletes have already been banned from competing by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
The IAAF’s decision was upheld by sport’s highest tribunal, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), last week.
The Russian sports minister says that ‘‘the majority’’ of Russia’s team complies with IOC criteria on doping and will be able to compete in Rio.
Vitaly Mutko says the criteria are ‘‘very tough, but that’s a kind of challenge for our team . . . I’m sure the majority of our team will comply’’.
Around ‘‘80 per cent’’ of the Russian team regularly undergoes international testing of the kind specified in the IOC criteria, he adds.
Mutko says he accepts the criteria but adds it is not fair that former dopers from other countries can compete.
Calls for a complete ban on Russia intensified after Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer commissioned by Wada, issued a report last Monday accusing Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing a vast doping program of its Olympic athletes.
McLaren’s investigation, based heavily on evidence from former Moscow doping lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, affirmed allegations of brazen manipulation of Russian urine samples at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, but also found that state-backed doping had involved 28 summer and winter sports from 2011 to 2015. But the IOC board decided against the ultimate sanction, in line with Bach’s recent statements stressing the need to take individual justice into account.
The IOC said the McLaren report had made no direct accusations against the Russian Olympic Committee ‘‘as an institution’’.
‘‘An athlete should not suffer and should not be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated,’’ Bach said after Sunday’s meeting.