PUTIN WILL ALLOW RUSSIAN ATHLETES TO COMPETE

President: Russians can compete as neutral athletes.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t boycott the Pyeongchang Olympics.

Putin said Wednesday his government will allow Russians to compete as neutral athletes at the upcoming games in South Korea.

The International Olympic Committee banned the Russian team from games as punishment for doping violations at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

The IOC, however, plans to invite individual Russians to compete under the Olympic flflag.

“Without any doubt we will not declare any kind of blockade,” Putin said in televised remarks after launching his re-election campaign at an automobile factory. “We will not block our Olympians from taking part, if any of them wish to take part as individuals.

“They have been preparing for these competitions for their whole careers, and for them it’s very important.”

A Russian boycott would have been the biggest at any Olympics since the Soviet Union and its allies missed the 1984 Los Angeles Games. That itself was in response to the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics four years earlier.

Putin also said Russia still did not accept accusations that it ran a state-backed doping system around the Sochi Olympics. He called the IOC ruling “politically motivated” and unfair “collective punishment.”

An IO C commission chaired by former Swiss president Samuel Schmid ruled Tuesday that there was a doping system but said it found no evidence that “the highest state authority” knew.

However, it said of Yuri Na go rnykh, the deputy sports minister at the time of the Sochi Games, “it is impossible to conclude that he was not aware” of doping cover-ups.

Russian athletes, coaches and politicians have lined up to condemn the IOC ruling, but most say it’s better to accept it and compete.

Russian IO C member Y elena Isinbayeva, a twotime Olympic gold medalist in the pole vault, came out against a boycott.

“I’d like to tell all Russian athletes preparing for the Olympics in Pyeongchang not to get disappointed in any case and defifinitely not to do anything stupid like a boycott,” Isinbayeva told state TV on Wednesday. “It’s clearly not worth it.”