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RUSSIA

No blanket IOC doping ban for Russian athletes

At a meeting in Lausanne on Sunday, the International Olympic Committee on Sunday ordered individual sports federations to decide whether Russian competitors should take part in the Rio Games after failing to agree on a complete ban over Russia's state-run doping.

No blanket IOC doping ban for Russian athletes
The IOC ruled that 800m runner Yuliya Stepanova, who turned whistleblower on doping in Russian athletics, could not go to Rio even as a neutral. Photo: AFP

The IOC executive decided that any Russian athlete wanting to go to Rio, where the Games start on August 5, will have to prove that he or she was not involved in the doping which an independent investigator said was organised by the sports ministry and Russian secret service.

An IOC ethics commission also ruled that 800m runner Yuliya Stepanova, who turned whistleblower on doping in Russian athletics, could not go to Rio even as a neutral.

“We have set the bar to the limit,” IOC president Thomas Bach said after the meeting in defending the action against the worst doping scandal in the Olympic movement's history.

The IOC had faced widespread pressure for tough action against Russia, which denied any state role in the doping. But many IOC members were said to be reluctant to ban a country completely for the first time over doping.

“Under these exceptional circumstances, Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of the Olympic competitions,” said the IOC.

It insisted that “the 'presumption of innocence' cannot be applied to them.”

But the Olympic leaders said “each affected athlete must be given the opportunity to rebut the applicability of collective responsibility in his or her individual case.”

The IOC said Russian athletes will have to satisfy the 28 federations who run the summer Olympic sports that they are clean. The conditions include:

* That “the absence of a positive national anti-doping test cannot be considered sufficient” by the federations.

* Federations will have 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”.

* No competitor or national federation named in the report issued last week by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) can be considered. About 20 different summer Olympic sports were accused in the McLaren report.

The damning report said Russia's sports ministry directed a vast doping programme with support from the state intelligence agency that saw thousands of tainted urine samples destroyed or swapped for clean ones.

The cheating went on during the 2014 Sochi Games and other major Olympic and international events, including the world athletics championship in Moscow in 2013.

WADA, along with 14 national anti-doping agencies — including the United States, Canada and Germany — and multiple national Olympic committees had called for Russia's blanket ban from Rio de Janeiro.

Russia's entire track and field squad had already been banned from the Olympics by athletics' governing body the IAAF over an earlier WADA report which detailed “state-supported” doping.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) this week rejected an appeal by 67 Russian athletes against the IAAF ban.

Russia had strongly denied any state role and railed against many of the conditions imposed by the IOC on Sunday.

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, a central figure in the WADA report who has already been barred from Rio by the IOC, told the TASS news agency earlier that “the principle of collective responsibility should not triumph”.

The IOC also delivered a crushing blow to Stepanova's hopes of competing in Rio. She had refused to run for Russia and hoped for a special Olympic charter exemption to compete as a neutral after she gave evidence to WADA.

The IOC ethics commission said : “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.”

But it added that Olympic rules “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 IOC executive said it would “like to express its appreciation for Mrs Stepanova’s contribution to the fight against doping and to the integrity of sport.”

RUSSIA

Russia announces no New Year’s greetings for France, US, Germany

US President Joe Biden, France's Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not be receiving New Year's greetings from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Friday.

Russia announces no New Year's greetings for France, US, Germany

As the world gears up to ring in the New Year this weekend, Putin sent congratulatory messages to the leaders of Kremlin-friendly countries including Turkey, Syria, Venezuela and China.

But Putin will not wish a happy New Year to the leaders of the United States, France and Germany, countries that have piled unprecedented sanctions on Moscow over Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

“We currently have no contact with them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“And the president will not congratulate them given the unfriendly actions that they are taking on a continuous basis,” he added.

Putin shocked the world by sending troops to pro-Western Ukraine on February 24.

While Kyiv’s Western allies refused to send troops to Ukraine, they have been supplying the ex-Soviet country with weapons in a show of support that has seen Moscow suffer humiliating setbacks on the battlefield.

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