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July 23, 2016

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Russian bid amid retest failures

RUSSIA yesterday made a last-ditch bid to avoid a blanket ban at the Rio Games over “state-run” doping as a fresh batch of drug test failures from Beijing 2008 and London 2012 rocked the Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee’s executive board is to hold a conference call tomorrow to discuss barring Russia from the Olympics starting on August 5 over bombshell doping revelations.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport on Thursday rejected an appeal by Russia’s track and field team against their suspension from Rio in a decision seen as a key indicator as the IOC debates whether to kick out the whole Russian team.

Russia is a sporting powerhouse whose absence from Rio would create the biggest crisis in decades for the Olympic movement and President Vladimir Putin launched a final push to avert a ban.

“The official position of the Russian authorities — the government, the president and all of us — is that in sport there is not and can be no place for doping,” Putin told government ministers.

Putin ordered officials to cooperate with the IOC and World Anti-Doping Agency and Russia’s Olympic committee to establish an anti-doping commission.

Against the backdrop of the Russian doping scandal, the IOC yesterday separately reported 45 new doping failures from the last two Games, bringing the total number of positive drug tests to 98 since a retesting program was launched.

The IOC has reanalyzed more than 1,200 samples, with the emphasis on medal winners, in a bid to clean up the Olympics’ reputation.

It said it was not able to identify the athletes concerned or their nationalities for legal reasons but said 30 positives came back from Beijing, including for 23 medal winners, and 15 from London.

The IOC is facing international pressure to act tough on Russia and ban the entire team over incendiary revelations of a “state-run doping system.”

Fourteen national anti-doping agencies, including the United States, Canada and Germany, sent a joint letter to IOC President Thomas Bach on Thursday urging him to ban the Russian team from Rio.

Officials in Moscow have slammed the decision by CAS to reject its appeal against a ban from the world athletics body IAAF, calling it part of a broader political campaign against Russia.

The ban on the track and field team already means that Russian star athletes like pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva and hurdler Sergey Shubenkov will not be in Rio.

Isinbayeva — who has threatened to call time on her career over the ban — slammed the CAS ruling as a “funeral for athletics.”




 

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