The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body for track and field, announced on Saturday, in a unanimous vote, that Russia had not done enough to restore global confidence in the integrity of its athletes.
Russia won 18 medals in track and field including eight golds at the last Summer Olympics. But when the Rio Games begin no track and field athletes will compete under the Russian flag. Not even East Germany, which conducted a notorious doping scheme throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, faced such a penalty.
“Politics was not playing a part in that room today,” Sebastian Coe, head of the track and field organisation, said about the vote. “It was unambiguous.”
The case against Russia has advanced over the past seven months. Reports by the World Anti-Doping Agency and news organisations have detailed a state-run doping scheme that punctured the integrity of the Olympics, seemingly upending many of the results from the 2008 Beijing Games, the 2012 London Games and the 2014 Sochi Games.
The allegations were wide-ranging and detailed: Athletes were given a three-drug cocktail of banned substances and liquor; authorities helped athletes evade drug tests by surreptitiously swapping out tainted urine; thousands of incriminating samples were destroyed; drug testers were threatened by members of Russia’s Federal Security Service.
Russia"s Track and Field Athletes Banned From Rio Olympics
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