OLYMPIC DOOR BOLTED AGAINST RUSSIAN HOPEFULS
Last-ditch appeal denied in bid to get 47 athletes to compete at Pyeongchang Games
The last-ditch appeal by 47 Russian athletes and coaches to take part in the Winter Olympics has failed.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) made the dramatic announcement Friday, just hours before the opening ceremonies.
CAS secretary-general Matthieu Reeb read the decision in the time-honoured manner of jurists the world over — 20 minutes later than scheduled and without taking a single question from hundreds of the international press.
The group had challenged an earlier International Olympic Committee decision not to invite them to join 169 others pronounced “clean” by the IOC and allowed to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” but under a neutral flag.
The three-member CAS panel of arbitrators found the IOC had the discretion to determine which athletes it would invite to participate.
It was always a curious appeal, one described by Canada’s Dick Pound this week as akin to an argument about whether one actually can have an entitlement, a right, to be invited to dinner.
Pound, the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and senior member of the IOC, predicted the Russians would fail because the IOC, like every other host on the planet, has no legal requirement about who should or shouldn’t be asked to sit at its table.
That table is these Olympics, of course, where the athletes of the world commit themselves, as the Olympic oath famously has it, to “a sport without doping and without drugs in the true spirit of sportsmanship.”
Yet doping, and the threat it poses to the fairness of sport, is the significant shadow over these Games, as it has been over so many previous ones.
Russia was found by independent investigator (and Canadian) Richard McLaren in 2016 to have engaged in an enormous statesanctioned conspiracy to defeat doping tests in Sochi in 2014 — and before and beyond.
It was an unprecedented finding essentially confirmed by a separate IOC commission headed by Samuel Schmid last year.
In his second report, McLaren and his team found that upwards of 1,000 individual Russian athletes were involved in or had benefited from the “manipulation to conceal positive doping tests,” though he acknowledged he wasn’t able to assess “the sufficiency of evidence to prove an Anti Doping Rules Violation (ADRV ) by any individual athlete.”
In the wake of those searing reports, the IOC banned Russia from these Games, found 43 Russian athletes had committed anti-doping rules violations, but nonetheless issued “invites” to others it considered clean. Fortytwo of the 43 banned athletes then appealed to the CAS and 28 of them won on Feb. 1, reversing their exile and theoretically meaning they could compete here.
But when the IOC didn’t immediately add them to the list of invitees, they again appealed to the CAS.
Thus, even as the first competition of these Olympics was underway Thursday — naturally it was a curling mixed doubles event between the United States and, you guessed it, Russia — lawyers for some of the Russians appeared at the ad hoc CAS hearing.
It was held at a condominium tower near the alpine skiing venue and was, of course, a secret proceeding. Press and public are never allowed in to CAS hearings, so reporters waited behind barriers, hoping for a word or two as the parties dispersed.
So mysterious are the workings of the CAS — even the signs for the hearing pointed merely to an elevator — that while a panel of arbitrators reversed the IOC ban on the 28 athletes, the actual reasons for the decisions haven’t yet been released.
Indications, however, in the CAS press release about the decisions is that the panel found insufficient evidence to prove individual rule violations or, in a twist on the old saying, that an absence of evidence may indeed be evidence of absence.
Given that McLaren found that before WADA investigators arrived at the Moscow laboratory central to the Russian scheme samples had been destroyed en masse, that should go some distance to explain the absence.
The CAS has promised to release the reasons for its decisions — the one reinstating the athletes and the one rejecting the challenge of the IOC’s refusal to invite them to compete — as quickly as possible.
But the result is, well, chaos. As WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said Thursday, “I’m saddened by the fact we are in CAS all day every day,” even on the eve of the opening ceremonies.
He’s saddened, Pound is furious (he said the IOC decision demonstrates the IOC no longer has the athletes’ backs) and Friday, when almost 3,000 athletes from the nations of the world watch as a representative takes the solemn oath on their behalf, they must be forgiven if they choke at the sight.
A year or two from now, how many more medal winners will be stripped of their hardware, how many more found to have cheated here?