Three weeks before the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, sports officials are still deliberating which Russian athletes will receive special clearance to compete, stirring speculation that the International Olympic Committee’s ban on Russia for its doping schemes will ultimately prove less severe than it was billed.
A panel appointed by the IOC last month has received applications from hundreds of Russian athletes who hope to compete in Pyeongchang. (Because Russia’s Olympic team is technically barred, the athletes would compete under the Olympic flag.) On Friday, the IOC revealed it has created a pool of 389 Russians who are eligible to compete under a neutral flag at the Games.
An IOC panel whittled down an initial list of 500 to create what it calls “a pool of clean athletes.” It wasn’t immediately clear why 111 others were rejected, whether because of doping suspicions or because they simply hadn’t qualified for the Olympics.
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The IOC will use the pool list to issue invitations to Russian athletes to compete in Pyeongchang, after checking their record of drug testing.
But even once that participant list is established, the 2018 Olympic roster will be far from fixed. Before the end of the month, an international sports court is due to hear the appeals of 39 Russian athletes whom the IOC barred for having doped at the 2014 Games.
Future appeals may take issue with the opaqueness of the process by which the IOC is reviewing Russian athletes’ eligibility — something a group of anti-doping officials criticized forcefully on Thursday. Following a summit in Bonn, Germany, officials from 20 nations urged the Olympic review panel — which is led by France’s former sports minister and includes representatives from the IOC and the top regulator of drugs in sports — to publish firm standards to be applied consistently to potential Olympians from Russia.
“Robust and demanding criteria, as well as the names of Russian athletes with their individual testing histories who have met them, need to be published as soon as possible,” the anti-doping leaders said in a statement.
The Olympic review panel that will issue invitations to Russian athletes is led by Valérie Fourneyron, France’s former sports minister and the current chair of a new global drug-testing authority created by the IOC. It also includes Gunter Younger, the director of intelligence and investigations for the World Anti-Doping Agency who previously worked for Interpol in Germany; Pedro Goncalves, a project manager for the Doping-Free Sport Unit who is overseeing pre-Games testing of all Olympic athletes; and Richard Budgett, the medical and scientific director of the IOC.
As Pyeongchang’s opening ceremony approaches, the unsettled roster of Russian athletes — as well as the friction between sports officials and anti-doping enforcers — has echoed the disarray of the last Olympics. At the 2016 Rio Games, Russian athletes were presumed tainted by their nation’s state-backed doping program unless they proved otherwise. That prompted a flood of legal disputes, with athletes petitioning to compete even after the Games had begun.
The anti-doping officials who spoke out Thursday — representing countries that included Australia, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom — urged the IOC not to grant entry to any of the hundreds of Russian athletes who have been implicated by past investigations into Russian doping, or by a trove of drug-testing data obtained by global sports regulators from Moscow last fall.
They called for any Russian athletes who are granted competition slots in Pyeongchang to have a minimum of one year of rigorous drug-testing outside of Russia. Russia’s anti-doping agency has been deemed non-compliant by the global regulator of drugs in sports for more than two years.
Days ago, at a tournament in Siberia, three dozen Russian athletes abruptly withdrew from a regional competition after drug-testing officials had arrived unannounced, according to Russian media. Many said they were ill and Russia’s track and field association said it had launched an investigation into the mass withdrawals.
On Thursday, the IOC announced that more than 14,000 doping tests had been conducted on more than 6,000 athletes from 61 countries “to optimize the protection of clean athletes ahead of Pyeongchang.”
“With extra scrutiny on Russian athletes, November and December saw testing on double the number of athletes from Russia than any other country,” the IOC statement said. The organization touted not just a higher volume of tests across countries, but the use of intelligence to focus on possible likely violators.
“This more targeted testing focuses on specific disciplines and nationalities that are at particular risk, as well as individual athletes and groups of athletes selected based on their ranking, and any suspicious change in performance or adverse testing history,” the statement said.
Russian athletes implicated in the nation’s doping scandal have continued to compete not just nationally but also in global competitions. On Thursday, the anti-doping officials urged Olympic executives not to grant entry to any Russian athlete with a pending disciplinary case.
Numerous such Russian Olympians whom the IOC has banned for cheating at the 2014 Games have continued to compete in their sports’ major international competitions this season and dominate standings. Some have qualified for the Olympics though they are prohibited from attending them — skewing global rankings and precluding other athletes from qualifying for their countries’ Olympic teams. In certain sports with unique qualification rules, barred athletes have earned points for their nation that could enable another Russian athlete to have a place at the Games.
Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have decried the Olympic ban while signalling satisfaction that Russian athletes will still be able to compete with a reference to their nationality, each identified as an “Olympic Athlete from Russia.”
With files from The Associated Press