Russian athletes barred from Rio Games

LAUSANNE: The international sports tribunal on Thursday rejected Russia’s appeal against a doping ban for its entire athletics team from the Rio Olympics, which

LAUSANNE: The international sports tribunal on Thursday rejected Russia’s appeal against a doping ban for its entire athletics team from the Rio Olympics, which starts August 5, drawing swift and angry condemnation from Moscow.

HT Image

The decision by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) increases the possibility that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will now exclude Russia from all sports, not just track and field, in Rio de Janeiro.

That would mark the deepest crisis in the Olympic movement since the US and Soviet boycotts of the 1980s, and would be a grave blow to a nation that prides itself on its status as a sporting superpower.

“CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes,” CAS said, backing the right of International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to suspend the Russian athletics federation.

Russia is one of the world’s fore most sporting powers which won the third biggest over all medal haul at the last summer Olympics in 2012 —though some of those results are now in question because of doping suspicions.

Double Olympic champion pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva — one of the 68 athletes part of the litigation — called the decision “the funeral of athletics”.

“Now let all these foreign pseudo-clean sportspeople sigh with relief and win their pseudo-gold medals in our absence,” Isinbayeva wrote on Instagram. “They have always feared (our) strength.”

The ban on Russia’s track-and-field team going to Rio was imposed last November by the IAAF after an independent report uncovered rampant state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics. It was maintained in June after the IAAF Council ruled that not enough progress had been made in transforming Russia’s anti-doping programme.

Russia had argued it had taken steps to clean up the sport, and that the blanket ban was unfair to individual athletes with no record of doping.

Russian officials, and many ordinary people in the country, have interpreted the doping allegations as part of a conspiracy inspired by Western governments who fear Moscow’s growing influence.

The Kremlin expressed “deep regret” over the decision and said it had “no legal basis.” A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry called the court decision “a crime against sport”. With its decision, the court was “absolutely violating the rights of clean athletes, creating a precedent of collective responsibility”, sports minister Vitaly Mutko said, calling the ruling “politicised”.

There were others, however, who welcomed the verdict. “This will scare a lot of people, or send a strong message that the sport is serious about cleaning up,” six-time Olympic sprint title winner Usain Bolt of Jamaica.

The ball is now in the court of the IOC to decide whether Russia should be excluded from all sports at the Rio Games.

Pressure on the IOC to take such a step increased this week after another report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed evidence of systematic state-sponsored doping by Russian competitors before and during the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi.

The IOC is expected to reach a final decision on Sunday.