Sport

Russia will not be banned from competing in Rio Olympics

IOC have opted not to enforce a blanket ban despite recommendations from Wada to do so

A man has been arrested after he tried to grab the Olympic torch during the official relay in Sao Paulo state, Brazil. The torch is scheduled to arrive in Rio de Janeiro on August 4. Video: REUTERS / TV GLOBO
Sean Ingle
Sun Jul 24 2016 - 13:06

The International Olympic Committee has decided against a blanket ban on Russian athletes from competing in Rio – ruling instead to allow the 28 individual federations that compromise the summer games to decide their fate.

Russian athletes will be allowed to go to Rio if they satisfy their sports governing body they are able to prove “to the full satisfaction of his of her International Federation” that they are demonstrably clean. However, crucially, the IOC have raised the bar on Russian entry by deciding that “the absence of a positive national anti-doping test cannot be considered sufficient by the IFs.”

Instead, individual federations are required to “carry out an individual analysis of each athlete’s anti-doping record, taking into account only reliable adequate international tests, and the specificities of the athlete’s sport and its rules, in order to ensure a level playing field.” With 12 days to go before the Olympics is due to start, each sport will be up against it.

The Russian Olympic Committee will not also be allowed to enter any athlete for the Olympic Games in Rio who has ever been sanctioned for doping, even if he or she has served the sanction.

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Already there are widespread accusations that the decision is a massive fudge. At the very least, the decision to delegate the decision to the individual federations could lead to huge inconsistencies. Some organisations, such as the International Weightlifting Federation, would be likely to ban Russian athletes wholesale because of the huge numbers of positive tests in that sport.

Others, like judo, appear inclined to let as many as possible into Rio. As Marius Vizer, the president of the International Judo Federation, explained last week: “The presence of Russian athletes is very important, as the Russian Judo Federation is a prominent member of the International Judo Federation, with Russian judo playing a great role in the history of sport.”

The IOC’s decision comes after months of agonising in the corridors of international sport about how to deal with the cascade of revelations of state-sponsored doping in Russia, which picked up speed last November after Dick Pound, the former World Anti-Doping Agency president, published a 325-page report detailing a “deep-rooted culture of cheating” in Russian athletics.

That led to the IAAF, athletics’ governing body, banning all Russian track and field athletes from international competition unless they could prove they had been comprehensively tested outside the Russian system.

Few, however, expected Russians competing in the other 27 summer Olympic sports to face similar pressures to prove they were clean. That all changed last Monday following an investigation by the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren into Russian doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and other Olympic summer sports.

What he found was staggering. From 2011 onwards, many organs of the state – including the Russian sports ministry, the Russian security service the FSB, and the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia (CSP) – were involved in switching hundreds of positive doping samples from athletes to clean ones taken when they were not using performance-enhancing drugs.

The cheating reached its nadir at the Winter Olympics, where McLaren confirmed the evidence of the former Russian anti-doping Grigory Rodchenkov, who revealed that a secret shadow laboratory – room 124 – was set up on the official premises of the building that processed doping tests.

In a development that could have come out of the pages of a John le Carré novel, tainted samples from Russian athletes were then passed through a small hole in the floor to this shadow laboratory, where they were replaced with clean urine from athletes collected months earlier. The elaborate procedure allowed Russian athletes to continue taking banned substances during the Games, giving them an advantage over their rivals.

Responding to the McLaren report, the IOC president, Thomas Bach, warned there had been “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games” yet his friendship with the Russian president, Vladmir Putin, meant that he continued to find a way to allow some Russian athletes to compete.

Meanwhile, speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek programme on Sunday, McLaren insisted that of the 10,500 athletes competing in Rio, only a tiny amount would be on performance-enhancing drugs.

“I would say it would be a very small percentage, probably under 1% or thereabouts, because every country in the world, the last thing they want is to have an athlete who is positive at the Olympic Games,” he said.

“There is a lot of checking that is done for people that go to the Olympics that isn’t done for any other kind of international competition, so that tends to suppress the number of positives. There are a few people who slip through the various tests but it is less than 1per cent.”

(Guardian service)