On Saturday, the IOC confirmed the invitation of 169 Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
They are allowed to compete as “Olympic athletes from Russia” (OAR). A week ago, the list of potential Olympic starters from Russia was reduced from 500 to 389 active participants due to possible involvement in the state doping affair.
The number has now fallen again due to qualification criteria and quota places. The IOC now assumes that OAR athletes travel to South Korea only beyond all doubt about doping.
This means that the OAR team in Pyeongchang will probably be 45 athletes smaller than the Russian team at the home games four years ago in Sochi (214 athletes). At that time, the hosts had cheated the sports world with a government-controlled doping system. 175 Russians had competed in Vancouver in 2010.
However, the number of Russian athletes in Pyeongchang could increase even more if the CAS International Sports Court were to overturn the lifelong Olympic suspensions imposed by the IOC against 39 athletes.
The appeal proceedings, which have been ongoing since Monday, are to be closed by Sunday at the latest. The CAS ruled that the judgment would be delivered on Tuesday to Friday of the following week (30 July 2008). January to 2. February) in prospect.
The athletes removed from the 500-strong proposal pool by the IOC Commission headed by former French Minister of Sport Valerie Fourneyron include numerous candidates for medals.
Biathlon star Anton Schipulin, six-time short-track Olympic champion Viktor Ahn and cross-country skier Sergei Ustjugov, among others, were not invited to Pyeongchang.
Among other things, there are alleged to have been anomalies in the analysis of the database of the Moscow doping control laboratory by the Fourneyron panel among the athletes concerned, which was seized by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
“It is in the interests of the IOC to ensure fair play and also in Russia’s interest to have only clean athletes compete at the games in Pyeongchang,”said German IOC President Thomas Bach on Wednesday. The young athletes from the giant empire now have the chance to be “ambassadors of a new and clean Russia”in South Korea.
At the beginning of December, the IOC excluded the Russian National Olympic Committee (ROC) from the Winter Games because of systemic doping, but offered clean Russian athletes the prospect of a start under Olympic flag and anthem under certain conditions.