Agence France-Presse
Montreal, July 19: International Olympic Committee (IOC) members were set for emergency talks Tuesday to decide Russia’s status for the Rio Olympics after an investigation found rampant state-run doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games and other events.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) called for all Russian competitors and officials to be banned from next month’s Games and other events after the report unveiled what IOC president Thomas Bach called “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games.”
A probe by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren for WADA found Russia’s secret service helped the state-dictated failsafe system carried out by the Moscow sports ministry and sprawling into 30 sports over five years.
“The scale of what was happening requires Russia be banned from the Olympics and Paralympics,” said British IOC athletes commission member Adam Pengilly. When asked if no ban imposed could mark the beginning of the end of the IOC, former skeleton competitor Pengilly replied, “It certainly has that potential.”
WADA’s executive committee said the IOC and the International Paralympics Committee should decline entries, for Rio 2016, of all athletes submitted by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee.”
It also called for Russian officials implicated in the scandal to be sacked and for Russian government officials to be denied access to international competitions, including Rio 2016. McLaren said the coverup started in 2010 after Russia’s abysmal results at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and continued until 2015 after the Sochi Games. It included the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow and 2013 World University Games in Kazan.
President Vladimir Putin made the Sochi Games a showcase event and spent more than $50 billion for staging the Games. Russia, which strongly denies any state involvement in doping, is already banned from international athletics by world governing body IAAF because of doping exposed last year. There will be mounting pressure for that to be extended, even though Bach and some international federations have called for a way for Russian athletes proved to be clean to compete in Rio.
“The IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated,” Bach said in a statement announcing the IOC conference Tuesday to consider provisional sanctions.
McLaren’s bombshell report said the sports ministry under Vitaly Mutko organised the subterfuge under which tainted urine samples were replaced and kept away from international observers. “The Moscow laboratory operated for the protection of doped Russian athletes within a state-dictated failsafe system,” McLaren said.