The Olympic Committee will decide this week whether to take an unprecedented action and ban Olympic powerhouse Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
2018 is supposed to be ‘Russia’s year’, as they’ll be hosting the World Cup in June, but the Olympic Committee have been reading through an investigation into Russian doping and the president Thomas Bach will announce their conclusion this week.
With just 66 days before Pyeongchang 2018 starts on 9 February, the signs point to Bach doing precisely that. The German and his board have been looking into the allegations of government involvement in the cheating when Russia hosted the last Winter Games in Sochi in 2014, and decide whether there’s enough evidence.
It will be one of the biggest decisions the IOC has ever taken, and the most important moment yet in the fight against drug cheats in what has blighted the IOC.
But will they be brave enough to ban Russia. Remember in 2016, just before the start of the 2016 Rio Games, the IOC came under huge pressure to ban the Russian team from the Olympics after an independent report by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren concluded the country had engaged in a state-sponsored doping.
Despite the proof, the IOC bottled it, and handed out responsibility to the international sporting federations. So why should things be any different this time around?
It’s also known that Bach has a close relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and many believed the IOC president would hand out a hefty fine instead. But that was before the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) decided Russia’santi-doping agency Rusada was still non-compliant with them.
Then there was a breakthrough in evidence, with Wada obtaining a Russian laboratory database, which it felt corroborated McLaren's conclusions. Re-tests of Russian athletes' samples, were done and this resulted in a host of retrospective bans and many medals being stripped from Russian athletes. 25 this last month!
There has been obvious denial from the Kremlin, but there is too much evidence to back it all up. What’s more, if the IOC are to skirt around an outright ban, it’s thought there could be a boycott from other nations.
But this would dismay many Russian athletes. There are some clean ones. "It would be unfair," former Olympic speed-skating champion and politician Svetlana Zhurova said. "I cannot advise the IOC, they know better than me, but I hope they will remember about the young and clean athletes for whom this will be their first Games. You feel so proud when you see your flag, it's very important for yourself and your country. It has to be individual responsibility, not collective.”
She has a point, but the IOC must show a no tolerance approach to such widespread cheating. Ok, the anti-doping programmes have improved but this is only a few years back and they got away with so much. They really need to show the world that they mean business against any cheats, no matter how big a nation.
Sources:
www.bbc.co.uk
www.eastwest.eu
www.gannett-cdn.com
www.dw.com
www.statista.com
