Russia banned from Olympics
2018 WINTER GAMES /
The International Olympic Committee banned Russia from the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea on Tuesday, an historic act of punishment for widespread doping that Olympic officials believe was supported by the Russian government.
Russia’s flag and anthem will be absent from February’s Pyeongchang Games, the IOC decided, as penalties for a doping regime that included the sabotage of drug testing during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.
Russian athletes who can prove their innocence of
drug cheating will be permitted to compete in Pyeongchang under the designation of an “Olympic Athlete from Russia (OAR).” The Olympic anthem will be played in any ceremony for medals won by these athletes, and Russia’s official medal count for the games will stand at zero.
In a Tuesday evening news conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, IOC President Thomas Bach called Russia’s doping system “an unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic games and sports.”
Bach was joined Tuesday by Samuel Schmid, the former president of Switzerland, who led a commission investigating the allegations against Russia for the IOC. Schmid’s report confirmed “the systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system in Russia,” he said.
A nation’s Olympic team had never been banned for doping, or any competitive violation. The IOC has issued politically motivated bans in the past, such as those imposed against Germany and Japan during World War II, and against South Africa during apartheid.
Russian lawmakers and other officials were defiant.
“We have nothing to apologize for and neither do our athletes,” said Pyotr Tolstoy, a leading member of the Russian State Duma, Russia’s lower house of the legislature.
Former Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko, whom the IOC banned for life from the Olympics, has consistently denied Russian government involvement in drug cheating. Russian President Vladimir Putiny had called a potential ban “humiliating” and implied it would provoke a Russian boycott.
But in Lausanne, Bach said: “An Olympic boycott has never achieved anything. I don’t see any reason for a boycott by the Russian athletes, because we will allow the clean Russian athletes to participate.”
The IOC plans to establish an independent testing authority to determine which Russian athletes will be allowed to compete, Bach said. The IOC fined Russia’s Olympic Committee $15 million, which it intends to use to pay for this testing.
Anti-doping officials — some of whom criticized the IOC for not levying a similar punishment before the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro — praised Tuesday’s decision.
“Today the IOC listened to those who matter most — and clean athletes won a significant victory,” said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
Said U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Scott Blackmun: “This decision will clearly make it less likely that this ever happens again.”
The absence of Russian athletes would sap many events of top competitors. In the 2014 Winter Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia led the medal count, but according to former Moscow anti-doping lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, that came after assistance behind the scenes.
Rodchenkov has said he oversaw a state-run doping system that provided hundreds of top athletes with banned performance-enhancing substances. When the Olympics came to Russian soil, according to Rodchenkov, he ran a clandestine effort to replace tainted urine samples with clean urine samples he collected months before.
Rodchenkov’s testimony, bolstered by two other Russian whistleblowers, has been supported by investigations by the World Anti-Doping Agency that concluded more than 1,000 Russian athletes across at least 30 sports had been involved in doping that dated from at least 2011.
Last month, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for Rodchenkov, who fled for the U.S. in 2015 after two colleagues at Russia’s anti-doping agency died suddenly. Rodchenkov is living somewhere in the United States under the protection of federal authorities.