IOC to decide Russia fate by Dec. 5
GENEVA — The International Olympic Committee will decide on Dec. 5 if Russia can compete at the Pyeongchang Winter Games.
Russia faces being banned from the Feb. 9-25 games in South Korea as punishment for state-backed doping at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
The IOC said on Friday that a “decision with regard to the participation of Russian athletes in the Olympic Winter Games Pyeongchang 2018 will be taken” by its executive board on the opening day of a Dec. 5-6 meeting in its home city of Lausanne.
IOC President Thomas Bach is scheduled to announce the decision at a news conference starting at 7.30 p.m. local time (1830 GMT).
Bach has criticized sport officials who call for a total ban on Russia, which could be offered sanctions that would allow some athletes to compete if they also have met stricter standards of doping controls.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said it would be “degrading” for its athletes to take part in the Winter Games as a neutral team and be denied their national flag and anthem.
That happened in August at the athletics world championships, where some Russian athletes won medals despite the Russian athletics body being suspended by the IAAF in fallout from the doping scandals.
The IOC board is awaiting reports from two commissions it created to verify evidence detailed by World Antidoping Agency investigator Richard Mclaren last year, weeks before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
One panel led by IOC board member Denis Oswald is prosecuting around 30 individual Russian athletes who are suspected of doping violations at Sochi. There, tainted samples were swapped with clean urine in the Wada-accredited testing laboratory.
Six cross-country skiers, including two medalists, have already been disqualified by Oswald’s three-man panel and banned from the Olympics for life. They plan appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
A second IOC panel is studying whether Russian state agencies, including the sports ministry and FSB security service, were involved in the doping program. That commission is chaired by Samuel Schmid, a former president of Switzerland.
The case for Russia to stay in the Pyeongchang Olympics got tougher this week when WADA declined to re-accredit the reformed national anti-doping agency known as RUSADA.