IOC leaders stop short of complete ban on Russians
Rejecting calls by anti-doping officials for a complete ban on Russia, Olympic leaders on Sunday gave individual global sports federations the task of deciding which athletes should be cleared to compete in next month’s Rio de Janeiro Games.
Citing the need to protect the rights of individual athletes, the International Olympic Committee decided against taking the unprecedented step of excluding Russia’s entire team over allegations of state-sponsored doping. Instead, the IOC left it to 27 sports federations to make the call on a case-by-case basis.
“Every human being is enti-
tled to individual justice,” IOC President Thomas Bach said after the ruling of his 15-member executive board.
At the same time, Bach said the IOC had decided on a set of “very tough criteria” that could dent Russia’s overall contingent and medal hopes in Rio, where the Olympics will open on Aug. 5.
Under the measures, no Russian athletes who have ever had a doping violation will be allowed into the games, whether or not they have served a sanction, a rule that has not applied to athletes in other countries.
In addition, the international sports federations were ordered to check each Russian athlete’s drug-testing record, with only doping controls conducted outside Russia counting toward eligibility, before authorizing them to compete. Final entry is contingent on approval from an independent sports arbitrator.
The IOC decision was sharply criticized by antidoping bodies as a sellout that undermines clean athletes and destroys the idea of a level playing field.
“In response to the most important moment for clean athletes and the integrity of the Olympic Games, the IOC has refused to take decisive leadership,” U.S. AntiDoping Agency CEO Travis Tygart said in a statement.
“The decision regarding Russian participation and the confusing mess left in its wake is a significant blow to the rights of clean athletes.”
Russia’s track and field athletes were already
banned by the IAAF, the sport’s governing body, in a decision that was upheld Thursday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The IOC accepted that ruling, but would not extend it to all other sports. Russia’s current overall team consists of 387 athletes, a number likely to be significantly reduced by the measure barring Russians who have previously served doping bans.
Calls for a complete ban on Russia intensified after Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer commissioned by WADA, issued a report Monday accusing Russia’s sports ministry of overseeing a vast doping program of its Olympic athletes.
McLaren’s investigation, based heavily on evidence from former Moscow doping lab director Grigory Rodchenkov, affirmed allegations of brazen manipulation of Russian urine samples at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, but also found that state-backed doping had involved 28 summer and winter sports from 2011 to 2015.
“An athlete should not suffer and should not be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated,” Bach told reporters on a conference call after Sunday’s meeting. “It is fine to talk about collective responsibility and banning everybody, but at the end of the day we have to be able to look in the eyes of the individual athletes concerned by this decision,”
Bach acknowledged the decision “might not please everybody.”
“This is not about expectations,” he said. “This is about doing justice to clean athletes all over the world.”
Asked whether the IOC was being soft on Russia, Bach said: “Read the decision . ... You can see how high we set the bar. This is not the end of the story but a preliminary decision that concerns Rio 2016.”
Tygart, however, questioned why the IOC “would pass the baton to sports federations who may lack the adequate expertise or collective will to appropriately address the situation within the short window prior to the games.”
The IOC also rejected the application by Russian whistleblower Yulia Stepanova, an 800-meter runner and former doper who helped expose the doping scandal in her homeland, to compete under a neutral flag at the games. Stepanova, now living in the United States, competed as an individual athlete at last month’s European Championships in Amsterdam.