MONTREAL: International Olympic Committee (IOC) members were set for emergency talks Tuesday to decide Russia’s status for the Rio Olympics after an investigation found rampant state-run doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games and other events.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) called for all Russian competitors and officials to be banned from next month’s Games and other sports after the report unveiled what IOC president Thomas Bach called “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games.”
A probe by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren for WADA found the FSB secret service helped “the state-dictated failsafe system” carried out by the Moscow sports ministry and sprawling 30 sports over five years.
WADA’s executive committee said the IOC and the International Paralympics Committee should “decline entries, for Rio 2016, of all athletes submitted by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and the Russian Paralympic Committee.”
It also called for Russian officials implicated in the scandal to be sacked and for “Russian government officials to be denied access to international competitions, including Rio 2016.”
McLaren said the coverup started in 2010 after Russia’s “abysmal” results at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and continued until 2015 after the Sochi Games. It included the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow and 2013 World University Games in Kazan.
President Vladimir Putin made the Sochi Games a showcase event and spent more than $50 billion staging the Games.
Russia, which strongly denies any state involvement in doping, is already banned from international athletics by world governing body IAAF because of doping exposed last year.
