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Thomas Bach
The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, wants cleared Russian and Kenyan athletes to compete in Rio to wear their national colours. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, wants cleared Russian and Kenyan athletes to compete in Rio to wear their national colours. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

IOC and IAAF may allow some Russian and Kenyan athletes to compete in Rio

This article is more than 7 years old
Only athletes individually cleared by respective federations can go to Rio
Differences over which banner Russian’s and Kenyan’s should compete under

Athletes from Kenya and Russia who want to compete at the Rio Olympic Games have less than two weeks to convince the International Association of Athletics Federations that they are innocent of doping.

The IAAF voted last week to uphold its ban on Russian track and field athletes because of systematic doping and on Tuesday the International Olympic Committee effectively extended the sanction to Kenya.

Having declared no faith in the anti-doping systems of those two countries, the IOC has decided only athletes who are individually cleared to compete by their respective international federations can go to Rio.

The IAAF passed a rule change last week that allows some athletes to apply to compete in special circumstances, and said a limited number of Russian athletes would fall into that category.

The federation said on Wednesday that the guidelines cover “any individual athletes who can clearly and convincingly show that they are not tainted by the Russian system because they have been outside the country and subject to other effective anti-doping systems”.

Those athletes “should be able to apply for permission to compete in international competitions, not for Russia but as a neutral athlete”, the IAAF said.

The IAAF and the World Anti-Doping Agency have been very clear that Kenyans and Russians who come through this process must wear neutral kit and compete under the IOC banner. But Thomas Bach, the IOC president, said on Tuesday that he wanted the athletes to be part of their national teams and wear national colours.

Bach’s comments, which were not expected by the IAAF or Wada, came despite him saying he completely supported the IAAF’s position.

The IAAF has now published its “exceptional eligibility” guidelines. Sebastian Coe, the IAAF president, said: “We know there are some Russian athletes considering applying to compete in international competitions under this new rule so it is important that they are clear about the criteria under which their application will be received.”

The guidelines on the Russians will first apply at the European championships in Amsterdam on July 6-10, with the Rio Games being staged from 5 to 21 August.

Applicants will have to email the IAAF’s general secretary, in English, and provide documentary evidence to prove they have clean anti-doping records that can be verified by credible agencies, which rules out athletes who can only point to negative tests from the Kenyan or Russian authorities.

Athletes will have to get their evidence to the IAAF two weeks before the qualification deadline of the competition they want to enter – for Rio 2016 that is July 18.

Links to banned coaches, long periods without being tested and incomplete ‘whereabouts’ information – used to help anti-doping agencies locate athletes for tests - will all count against applicants.

The final decision rests with the IAAF Doping Review Board, which comprises the American lawyer Bob Hersh, the former Olympian Abby Hoffman from Canada and Finland’s Antti Pihlakoski, although it is likely they will bring in extra help from Wada and Hoffman will not rule on Russians because of her work on the assessment of their doping clear-up.

The key issue for the board will be deciding what, in the words of the criteria, is a “sufficiently long period for the athlete to have been subject to other [fully adequate] anti-doping systems outside of the country of his/her national federation”.

With the vast majority of Russian athletes training at home, the IAAF has already indicated that only “very few” athletes will be get through the “crack in the door”, and some observers have speculated that could be as few as three or four competitors.

This has prompted a furious reaction from Russia and on Thursday it was confirmed by the Russian Olympic Committee that it would be filing “class action” appeals against the IAAF at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Meanwhile, the Russian hammer thrower Sergey Litvinov, who was fifth at the world championships last year, has published an open letter to Coe, asking him for guidance on what he can do to convince people of his clean record.

“I am not in denial ... Russia has a problem and many athletes do not realize the extent of it,” the 30-year-old wrote on the HMMR Media website. “But I cannot change this problem so I am also angry.

“I am angry because I have dedicated a majority of my life to the hammer throw and I have done it clean. Despite immense pressure to break the rules I decided to sacrifice results and now am punished for it.

“At the same time I am sad because there is no clear path forward for me and other clean Russians to compete again. Rather than arguing over the fairness of the action, I want to discuss the way forward – I want to find out how I can compete again.”

The IAAF’s detailed guidelines should now answer Litvinov’s questions and his case will provide a good indication of how many Russian athletes will get through the IAAF process, as he has a clean record and dual German-Russian nationality but trains in Russia.

The guidelines also highlight another potential row and that is on the issue of what kit these ‘neutral athletes’ will wear and under what flag they appear.

The IOC said on Tuesday that the IAAF has no say on which flags athletes compete under at the Olympics. The IOC said it backed the IAAF’s decision to maintain the ban on the Russian track federation. But Bach, the IOC president, said on Tuesday that any athletes approved by the IAAF would come under the control of the Russian Olympic Committee and compete under the national flag.

Bach’s statement opened a crack in what had meant to be a united front on Russia. The Wada president, Craig Reedie, who is also an IOC vice-president, came out publicly on Wednesday in support of the IAAF and against the IOC on the flag issue.

Meanwhile, the IOC has welcomed weightlifting’s surprise move to provisionally exclude Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia from the Rio Olympics.

The International Weightlifting Federation announced the bans on Wednesday after the opening day of a two-day executive board meeting was dominated by the sport’s doping crisis. With 17 of the 54 athletes caught by the IOC’s recent retesting of samples from the 2008 and 2012 Games being weightlifters, the sport has come under huge pressure to act.

“We welcome the strong signal sent by the IWF,” an IOC statement said. “The international federations are responsible for declaring the technical eligibility of their athletes, in particular in relation to doping issues. The IOC is working hard to finish all disciplinary proceedings in time before Rio, so that the federations could potentially do their sanctions before the Olympic Games.”

That last point relates to the fact those positives from the re-analysed Beijing and London samples are themselves still provisional, although the IWF has named all of its implicated athletes.

The IWF already has a rule that any country responsible for nine positive tests in a calendar year gets a one-year ban – Bulgaria triggered this rule in November after 11 of its successful weightlifting team tested positive for steroids. But the executive board meeting in Tbilisi went even further, deciding that any country responsible for three or more of the Olympic retest positives should also be banned.

Kazakhstan leads this list, with all four of its London 2012 champions being among those caught cheating. All together, 10 of the 90 medals awarded at the last two Games are likely to be reallocated.

As well as the provisional bans, the IWF stripped Olympic quota places from eight countries for being among those caught out by the IOC retests. It also called for more testing, the storage of more samples and an independent investigation into the national weightlifting federations of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Whether this will be enough, though, to restore the sport’s reputation remains to be seen, as its appalling doping record is likely to see it very near the top of any list of sports that can be cut from the Games to fit new, more fashionable ones in.

As one very senior Olympic insider put it: “Weightlifting should get a tick for having the guts to do something serious about doping – lots of sports don’t. But it will also get a cross because whatever it does, it isn’t working.”

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