RIO DE JANEIRO — Olympic officials announced on
Thursday night that 271 Russian athletes had been approved to compete in the
Rio Games — 118 fewer than the country had hoped to enter.
But with less than 24 hours until the opening
ceremony, the matter remained in question. Soon before the International Olympic
Committee’s announcement, an
appeals court issued a ruling in favor of two Russian athletes that seemed to
undercut the officials’ case against their delegation.
The Olympic committee’s exclusion of nearly a third of Russia’s athletes for their ties to a government-sanctioned
doping program was a blow to the integrity of the Games and will severely
diminish Russia’s presence across several sports in Rio. Still, Thursday’s
decision was far better for Russia than what many antidoping officials had
called for: a ban on its entire team.
The International Olympic Committee said that it had
consulted with top officials for the 28 sports participating in the Summer
Games. Those officials had been asked to scrutinize the drug-testing history of
each Russian athlete.
A panel appointed by the
Olympic committee approved the final Russian roster, the makeup of which had
been uncertain until deliberations concerning wrestlers and swimmers concluded.
If the Olympic committee’s ruling stands, Russia will
now have a smaller delegation of athletes than 11 other countries, including
Italy and Spain. Russia sent 436 athletes to the last Summer Olympics, in
London in 2012. The United States has the largest number of athletes, 556, in
Rio.
Last-minute legal challenges to the Olympic
committee’s decision are likely.
In the wake of a doping scandal that implicated dozens
of Russian athletes and government officials, Olympic officials had decided
that Russian athletes hoping to compete in Rio should be presumed guilty and
invited to present a case for innocence only if they had never before had a
drug violation. The appeals court said Thursday that notion was unenforceable.
Athletes who have been denied entry may still appeal
to world sports’ arbitration court, which is based in Switzerland but has
established a satellite office in Rio for the Olympics and is prepared to
adjudicate cases quickly. The on-site court’s focus, however, is doping cases
that arise at the Games rather than broader policy issues, and it is unclear
how well equipped the operation may be for a flood of challenges to the
eligibility decision.
As recently as this week, the sports court issued
verdicts on Russian athletes who had been barred for doping by their sports’
authorities. The court upheld the bans that track and field, rowing and weight lifting officials had imposed on
Russian Olympic hopefuls.
But other federations in other sports, such as boxing,
had approved full rosters of athletes, leaving no need for appeals.
The Olympic committee’s choices in disciplining Russia
have been the subject of dispute and are likely to fuel debate for months to
come as the authorities anticipate an overhaul of the antidoping system.
“For clean athletes, I think the situation in Rio is
tough to watch,” said Travis Tygart, head of the United States Anti-Doping
Agency. “It’s a mess, and Exhibit A of how truly incapable sport is of policing
itself.”
Some athletes and
antidoping officials lobbied for what Thomas
Bach, the Olympic committee’s president, referred to as “the nuclear option” —
excluding Russia’s entire team in a rebuke of its government’s role in cheating
schemes that corrupted the results of recent Olympics.
“This was a pervasive state-designed and -operated
system stretching across sports,” said Richard W. Pound, a former president of
the World Anti-Doping Agency and a former top Olympic committee executive. “At
that point you have to say, You’re showing such contempt for the rules of the
game, we don’t want you at the Olympics.”
Mr. Bach and fellow Olympic executives rejected that
option, a decision Mr. Bach defended this week by saying he wanted
to avoid the “death and devastation” it could have produced.
Instead, Olympic officials reversed the basic
principle of presuming athletes innocent until proven guilty. “The difficult
question we had to answer,” Mr. Bach said Thursday, “was, Can you hold an
individual responsible for the wrongdoing of his or her country?”
Last month, Olympic officials asked each sport’s governing body to make preliminary
decisions that the I.O.C.-appointed panel would review. They instructed the
authorities to consider Russian athletes tainted by the state-run doping system
unless their testing histories proved otherwise.
Those instructions were not necessarily interpreted
uniformly by the governing bodies of various sports, with some ratifying all
Russian athletes within hours, as tennis did, and others deliberating for the past week and
seeking further guidance.
Alexander Zhukov, president of Russia’s Olympic
committee, made a final plea to sports officials this week at an oceanside
hotel in Rio. He expressed frustration that Russia’s athletes were guilty by
default. “Is this not discrimination?” he said.
The evening before Olympic officials made their announcement,
Mr. Zhukov rightly estimated that between 270 and 280 Russian athletes —
roughly 70 percent of what Russia had planned for — would be cleared to
compete.
“It’s a good question,” he said, shrugging as he
guessed. “Unfortunately, we lost our weight lifters.
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