Associated Press
Moscow, June 20: Two Russian athletes said Sunday they have appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to overturn the IAAF’s ban on the entire Russian team competing in Olympic track and field events.
The IAAF, track and field’s world governing body, Friday upheld a suspension of the Russian team imposed in November after a WADA report detailed widespread, state-sponsored doping.
Race walkers Denis Nizhegorodov and Svetlana Vasilyeva argued that a ban of the entire team is unfair punishment. Nizhegorodov, an Olympic silver medallist in 2004, said, “Competing at the Olympics is the main goal and main honour for athletes. We will get that right.”
In a separate statement Vasilyeva stated that the IAAF had no right to stop her participation at Rio. “Now they want to take away my chance to compete at the Olympics, even though I haven’t done anything to cost me a place in Rio,” Vasilyeva said. “From bitter experience I understand that you can’t wait and hope for a good result, you have to act.”
Both athletes asserted that they will reject an IAAF measure that would allow some Russian athletes to compete under a neutral status, rather than the Russian flag, if they can show they are clean and have been tested regularly by a reputable testing authority outside Russia.
“I’m a citizen of Russia, a great sports power. I don’t agree with competing under the Olympic flag,” pointed out Nizhegorodov.
In a separate development, the Russian track and field federation informed that it had nothing to do with the appeals. “No one at the federation has any connection to this (appeal),” spokeswoman Alla Glushchenko stated. “We’ve started work with lawyers. In any case, you have to receive the official IAAF ruling and we don’t have it yet.”
Russian race walking is among the events most seriously affected by doping. Nizhegorodov comes from a training centre that has seen over 30 doping cases in the last decade.
The appeal by Nizhegorodov and Vasilyeva came as IAAF president Sebastian Coe defended the decision to ban Russia, while saying it should not be seen as an attempt to stop clean Russians from competing.
“We did not make a decision on clean athletes,” Coe wrote in an article for Britain’s ‘Sunday Telegraph’ newspaper. “We evaluated a system and a culture within which all athletes in Russia are competing, a tainted system that cast doubts on every athlete who is part of it.”
