Olympic Games 2018: Russian stars excluded from Olympics in Pyeongchang

The Russian biathlete Anton Schipulin, relay Olympic champion 2014, as well as the six-time short-track Olympic champion Viktor Ahn and the two-time cross-country skiing world champion Sergei Ustjugov are not allowed to participate in the winter games in Pyeongchang (9th place). till 25. February) will be launched.

As the Russian Olympic Committee ROC announced on Tuesday, in addition to this trio, the pair-run Olympic singles Xenia Stolbowa and ice dancer Iwan Bukin were removed from the list of candidates for a start under neutral flag because they were involved in the scandal of state doping.

The decision of the “Invitation Review Panel”used by the IOC, which determines which athletes would be eligible for a start, was not understood by the ROC. The mentioned athletes, said ROC Vice President Stanislav Posdnijakov, had “never been involved in any kind of doping scandal” and had “proved in their careers through numerous doping tests that they were” clean athletes “.

The ROC did not recognize the decision as final, even though Ahn’s lawyer had already stated that the time until the start of the Olympics was too short for an objection.

While Russia’s ski hunters in Schipulin (30) have the best athlete by far gone, Ahn (32) has a dream of starting in the country of birth. Born in Seoul, Ahn had been granted Russian citizenship in 2011 and won three gold and one bronze medals at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. Eight years earlier, he had succeeded in doing the same under the South Korean flag under his birth name Ahn Hyun-Soo in Turin.

At the beginning of December, the IOC excluded the ROC from the Winter Games because of systematic doping, but under certain conditions offered clean Russian athletes a start under Olympic flag and anthem.