The International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) became the second sports body to ban the entire Russian team from participating in the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Russia’s track & field team had been excluded earlier.
“The integrity of the weightlifting sport has been seriously damaged on multiple times and levels by the Russians, therefore an appropriate sanction was applied in order to preserve the status of the sport,” said a statement published on the IWF website and reported by rt.com.
Weightlifting is a sport historically associated with doping offenses, and Russia’s athletes have been some of the most heavily implicated in the recently-published McLaren Report sponsored by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which allegedly exposed state-sponsored cheating.
“Eight athletes were nominated by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to compete in the Rio Olympic Games weightlifting events. Tatiana Kashirina’s and Anastasiia Romanova’s nominations were withdrawn by the ROC due to prior anti-doping rule violations,” wrote the IWF.
“Four additional athletes were listed in the McLaren Report as beneficiaries of the Disappearing Positive Methodology System," added the statement, referring to an alleged system in which tainted samples from athletes were replaced with clean ones by officials in exchange for money, or in order to earn Russia international prestige from better performances.
With six out of the eight members of the team accused of past or present violations, the IWF referred to last week’s ruling by the International Olympic Committee, which left it to individual federations to decide whether Russia’s teams can participate in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, noting that “Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of the Olympic competitions.”
Russian weightlifter and two-time European champion Andrey Demanov told RT that the athletes’ dreams had been shattered by the IWF decision.
