IOC veteran Richard Pound has sharply criticized the International Olympic Committee for its actions in the doping crisis around Russia.
The British IOC member Adam Pengilly also questioned the decisions at the IOC session in Pyeongchang/South Korea. In the end, however, the IOC General Assembly voted in favour of the course of the IOC leadership, except for two abstentions.
Pound wondered,”A large part of the world believes that the IOC has failed and dropped clean athletes,”said Pound, senior IOC member.
The Canadian criticized drastic measures.”We talk more than we do. But our future depends on what we do and not what we say,”said Pound, founder president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Pound would have wished that the IOC Russia because of systematic doping at the home games 2014 in Sochi from the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang (9. till 25. Instead of being punished appropriately, everything was done to give the neutral team a Russian profile,”Pound said.
The IOC had invited the National Olympic Committee of Russia (ROC) to participate in the 5th Olympic Games. December, but clean Russian athletes in Pyeongchang allowed a start under neutral flag and anthem.
At the closing ceremony of the Winter Games two and a half months after the suspension, the Russians will be able to return to the stadium under their flag.
“I only give two things to consider,”said Pengilly, one of the few critics of IOC President Thomas Bach’s.”A doping offender is usually banned for four years, not two and a half months,” he also asked when Russia would finally accept investigator Richard McLaren’s evidence on the doping system.
Bach countered Pound with an anecdote about an encounter that had taken place a few days earlier in the Olympic Village.
At dinner, an athlete from Pound’s home country of Canada spontaneously approached him and said,”He thanked me for all that the IOC has done in the fight against doping,”said Bach.