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 comprise the summer Games to decide their fate.
Russian athletes will be allowed to go to the Games if they satisfy their sport’s governing body they can prove “to the full satisfaction of his or her International Federation (IF)” that they are demonstrably clean. However, crucially, the IOC has 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 will be 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 start, each sport will be up against it. The International Tennis Federation moved quickly and within hours of the decision cleared all seven Russian tennis players to compete at the Games.
“The seven Russian tennis players who have been nominated to compete in Rio have been subject to a rigorous anti-doping testing programme outside Russia,” it said in a statement. “The ITF believes that this is sufficient for the seven Russian tennis players to meet the relevant requirement of today’s decision of the IOC Executive Board.”
The Russian Olympic Committee will not be allowed to enter any athlete for Rio who has ever been sanctioned for doping, moreover, even if he or she has served the suspension.
Already there are widespread accusations that the decision is a huge fudge. At the very least, the plan 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 when Dick Pound, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s former 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.
Only two athletes, Darya Klishina, who trains in Miami, and the whistleblower, Yuliya Stepanova, were given permission to go to the Games if they compete under a neutral flag.
However, in a controversial decision, the IOC decided against allowing Stepanova – whose revelations of widespread state-sponsored doping informed a vital part of the Pound report – to compete because they had no provision for athletes to compete under a neutral flag.
In a statement, the IOC said: “While it is true that Mrs Stepanova’s testimony and public statements have made a contribution to the protection and promotion of clean athletes, fair play and the integrity and authenticity of sport, the rules of the Olympic Charter related to the organisation of the Olympic Games run counter to the recognition of the status of neutral athlete.
“Furthermore, the sanction to which she was subject and the circumstances in which she denounced the doping practices which she had used herself do not satisfy the ethical requirements for an athlete to enter the Olympic Games.”
The decision was greeted with dismay by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which accused the IOC of refusing to take decisive leadership.
The organisation’s CEO, Travis Tygart, said: “Many, including clean athletes and whistleblowers, have demonstrated courage and strength in confronting a culture of state-supported doping and corruption within Russia. Disappointingly, however, 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. The decision regarding Russian participation and the confusing mess left in its wake is a significant blow to the rights of clean athletes.
“The IOC has stated before that they believe anti-doping should be wholly independent and that is in part why it is so frustrating that in this incredibly important moment, they 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 conflict of interest is glaring.
“In regard to Yuliya Stepanova, the decision to refuse her entry into the Games is incomprehensible and will undoubtedly deter whistleblowers in the future from coming forward.”
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 doping by Russia at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and in other Olympic summer sports.
What he found was staggering. From 2011 onwards many organs of the state – including the Russian sports ministry, the Russian federal security service, and the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia – 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 chief 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 untainted urine collected from athletes months earlier. The elaborate procedure allowed Russian athletes to continue taking banned substances during the Games, giving them an advantage over 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 athletes to compete.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, meanwhile, McLaren insisted that of the 10,500 athletes competing in Rio only a tiny number 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 1%.”
