Russia’s team gets barred
After appeal failure, athletes will not compete in next month’s Rio games
geneva» Two days after Russia finished fourth in the Olympic medal table, its Paralympic team was barred from the next big games in Rio de Janeiro as punishment for a state-backed doping program.
Sport’s highest court Tuesday upheld a decision by the International Paralympic Committee to exclude the sports superpower. It was a step the IOC declined to take when it had the chance last month.
The 267 entries that Russian Paralympic athletes earned in 18 sports for the Sept. 7-18 games in Rio will now be allocated to other nations not judged responsible for orchestrated cheating.
Russia won 36 gold medals at the 2012 Paralympics, second most in London, and was a runaway table-topping leader at its home 2014 Winter Paralympics.
Still, the Sochi Winter Games and Winter Paralympics are now notorious for results corrupted by state-funded agencies plotting to swap tainted doping samples from Russian athletes for clean ones at official testing laboratories.
In the fallout from those recent revelations — by the Russian lab director who has fled to the United States and a World AntiDoping Agency inquiry set up to investigate his claims — the Court of Arbitration for Sport announced its urgent verdict Tuesday.
CAS dismissed the Russian Paralympic Committee’s appeal against exclusion from competing in Rio after a hearing was held in Brazil on Monday.
The court said its judges agreed the world Paralympic body “did not violate any procedural rule” in banning the Russian team two weeks ago.
Then, in Rio, the IPC president Philip Craven had said of Russia: “Their medals over morals mentality disgusts me.”
“(The) decision to ban the (Russian team) was made in accordance with the IPC Rules and was proportionate in the circumstances,” the sports court said Tuesday in a statement.
Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev blamed the doping ban on politics.
“The investigation about the Russian doping is a thick and disgusting mix containing 80 percent of politics and 20 percent of the actual doping, the politics targeting against sports, Russian athletes and Russia as a country,” Medvedev wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
Medvedev described the ban as “a doubly cynical decision since we’re talking about people who have to overcome themselves every day. It’s a blow for all disabled people, not just the Russian ones.”
A further appeal to Switzerland’s federal court is possible, though unlikely before the games open, an attorney representing the Russian athletes, Alexei Karpenko, said in televised remarks.
The Swiss supreme court could intervene if the legal process was abused by Lausanne-based CAS, though it would not rejudge the evidence. The CAS panel was satisfied that organized Russian doping was proven.
The Russian appeal to CAS “did not file any evidence contradicting the facts on which the IPC decision was based,” the court’s judging panel said.
The world Paralympic governing body used evidence from an ongoing WADA-appointed investigation into a Russian state program of doping and coverups that ran from 2011 to 2015 in almost 30 summer and winter sports.