PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — An appeals court on Friday ruled against 47 Russian athletes and coaches who were challenging the International Olympic Committee’s decision that they could not participate in the 2018 Winter Games.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport, generally considered the final arbiter for legal disputes in Olympic sports, announced the decision about nine hours before the opening ceremony was scheduled to begin.
The legal dispute boiled down to this: the International Olympic Committee believed that because it had barred Russia’s Olympic Committee from the Pyeongchang Games for a systematic doping program, it was entitled to invite and exclude any Russian athletes and coaches; the Russian athletes, meanwhile, contended that they should be allowed to participate after the appeals court ruled last week there was insufficient evidence to link each of them to Russia’s cheating.
Matthieu Reeb, the court’s secretary general, said the applicants “did not demonstrate that the manner of two special commissions established was carried out in a discriminatory, arbitrary or unfair manner.”
Russia is nominally barred from the Winter Olympics because of its state-backed doping program and an elaborate cheating scheme carried out at the last Winter Games. That means there will be no Russian officials, flag or anthem during this Olympics.
But individual athletes who were considered clean were permitted to enter as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” Russia initially announced it would send a team of 169 athletes to the Games, not far off from its usual delegation.
The athletes in limbo were cross country skiers and biathletes, bobsledders and speedskaters, hockey players and figure skaters. They included Viktor Ahn, a short-track speedskater who has won six Olympic gold medals, and Anton Shipulin, a biathlon world champion.
Elena Nikitina, a skeleton racer, was also among the athletes seeking a last-minute reprieve. At the 2014 Sochi Games, she won a bronze medal, finishing four-hundredths of a second ahead of Katie Uhlaender of the United States.
“In its decisions, the CAS arbitrators have considered that the process created by the IOC to establish an invitation list of Russian athletes to compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR) could not be described as a sanction but rather as an eligibility decision,” the court said in a statement.
Olympics officials first learned about Russia’s state-backed doping program in May 2016. After completing its own prolonged investigations that reiterated what had been known for more than a year, the I.O.C. in December barred Russia’s Olympic committee from the Games and prohibited all insignia linked to the country. But in an effort to avoid punishing athletes who did not cheat, the I.O.C. later cleared more than 160 athletes it determined to be clean to participate as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”
Russia continues to deny the existence of a state-sponsored doping program.