IOC three-person panel will make final ruling

An International Olympic Committee panel of three will make a final ruling on which individual Russian athletes are allowed to compete in Rio.

The IOC’s ruling executive board, meeting yesterday for the final time before the Games opening next Saturday, said the panel would decide on the entry of Russian athletes whose names had been forwarded to compete by their international sports federations and approved by an independent arbitrator.

“This panel will decide whether to accept or reject that final proposal,” said Mark Adams of the IOC. “We want to make it absolutely clear that we are the ones making the final call.”

The move comes amid a doping scandal that has led to the exclusion of more than 100 Russian athletes linked to state-sponsored cheating. The federations have cleared more than 250 Russians to compete.

The panel must make its ruling before the opening ceremony, just six days away. “We’re working on a very, very tight timeline,” Adams said.

The panel will be three executive board members: Turkey’s Ugur Erdener, chairman of the IOC medical commission; Germany’s Claudia Bokel, head of the athletes’ commission; and Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, a vice-president of the modern pentathlon federation.

Adams said the panel would review every athlete cleared by the federations, but would not reopen the cases of those who have been barred.

We want to make it absolutely clear that we are the ones making the final call.

An arbitrator from the Court of Arbitration for Sport will make an initial ruling before the final decision goes to the IOC panel.

“This review board panel will look at every single decision, every single athlete, to make sure the IOC is happy with the decision that’s been taken,” Adams said. “It’s very important that the IOC makes the final decision based on independent advice.”

The meeting yesterday came less than a week after the IOC board decided not to ban Russia’s entire team because of state-sponsored doping. Rejecting calls by more than a dozen anti-doping agencies for a complete Games ban on Russia, the IOC left it to the federations to vet which athletes could compete or not.

Those banned so far include the 67 track and field athletes barred as a whole by the IAAF, and more than 30 others rejected under new IOC eligibility criteria. Russia’s eightmember weightlifting team was barred on Saturday for what the international federation called “extremely shocking” doping results that brought the sport into “disrepute”.

The IOC has been roundly criti-

Mark Adams, IOC spokesman