IOC sanctions 6 Russian athletes as part of Oswald Commission findings

NEW DELHI: As many as six Russian Ice Hockey players have been sanctioned as per the new decisions by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

These decisions were taken after Oswald Commission hearings, which are being conducted in the context of the Sochi 2014 forensic and analytic doping investigations.

The six Russian atheletes include - Inna Dyubanok, Ekaterina Lebedeva, Ekaterina Pashkevich, Anna Shibanova, Ekaterina Smolentseva and Galina Skiba. The case opened against a seventh athlete has been closed without a sanction.

More hearings concerning other athletes will be held over the next few weeks.

The IOC Disciplinary Commission, composed for these six cases, decided the following:

• Inna Dyubanok, Ekaterina Lebedeva, Ekaterina Pashkevich, Anna Shibanova, Ekaterina Smolentseva and Galina Skiba are found to have committed anti-doping rule violations pursuant to Article 2 of the International Olympic Committee Anti-Doping Rules applicable to the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, in 2014, and are disqualified from the events in which they participated.
• The six athletes are declared ineligible to be accredited in any capacity for all editions of the Games of the Olympiad and the Olympic Winter Games subsequent to the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014.
• The Russian Team is disqualified from the Women’s Ice Hockey Event and the International Ice Hockey Federation is requested to modify the results of the event accordingly.

In addition to these six decisions, the IOC Disciplinary Commission has issued a seventh decision in which it found that the elements in the file and the conclusions of the investigations conducted so far were not sufficient to establish an anti-doping rule violation. Accordingly, the disciplinary proceedings opened against the athlete were terminated and the case filed. In order to protect the rights of the athlete, the identity of the athlete concerned will not be disclosed and the decision will not be published at this point in time.

The Disciplinary Commission, chaired by IOC Member Denis Oswald, is responsible for investigating the alleged doping violations by individual Russian athletes. Therefore, all the samples collected from Russian athletes at the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014 that were available to the IOC were re-analysed. This had two goals: to further review the samples for evidence of doping, and separately to determine if the samples themselves or the bottles were manipulated or tampered with.

Due to the nature and complexity of the cases, this thorough, comprehensive and time-consuming process has taken several months and had to involve external forensic experts, who had to develop a legally-defendable methodology for all the cases under the jurisdiction of the Disciplinary Commission. Due process has to be followed, and re-analysis is still underway.

As of now, the number of cases opened by the Disciplinary Commission has reached 46 after additional findings from the re-analyses. Thirty-three of them have already been heard, of which two have been filed.