More Russian Athletes Banned From Olympics

Russia’s Olympic committee (ROC) has removed three cyclists from the team heading to the Rio Games while three more, who were potentially implicated in the McLaren report, are under investigation, the UCI announced yesterday. 

The trio withdrawn by the ROC had previously been sanctioned for anti-doping violations, which meant they failed to meet the eligibility criteria put in place for Russian athletes by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The latest doping scandal to rock Olympic and Russian sport was triggered this month by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren whose report for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) detailed an elaborate doping system directed by the Moscow sports ministry and used in more than 30 sports over four years.

The IOC sparked fierce criticism on Sunday when it resisted a blanket ban on the country in favour of allowing individual sports federations to make the call on which Russians can go to Rio. The UCI decision takes the number of Russian athletes suspended from Rio to 111 of the 387 initially announced by the ROC.

Meanwhile, United World Wrestling, the governing body for Olympic forms of wrestling, said a special commission it set up had recommended that 16 of the 17 Russian wrestlers who qualified for the Rio Olympics should be allowed to take part.

It said in a statement the 16 had been tested in accredited laboratories outside Russia, and were not mentioned in a McLaren report. It said one competitor, Viktor Lebedev, should not take part in Rio because he had a positive doping test in 2006.

The Badminton World Federation (BWF) has included four Russian players in the draws, “pending the validation of the IOC.”  The BWF held the draws for the Rio Games on Tuesday and included Vladimir Malkov and Natalia Perminova in the men’s and women’s singles as well as the men’s doubles partnership of Vladimir Ivanov and Ivan Sozonov.

“We have had a rigid drug-testing programme, especially leading up to Rio 2016 and all four Russian athletes have been tested in and out of competition and their samples have been analysed outside of Russia,” Secretary General Thomas Lund said during the draw. The badminton competition at the Rio takes place from Aug. 11-20.

 gulf-times.com