Russian athletes will not be competing in the September Paralympics after authorities discovering irrefutable evidence of doping.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has voted unanimously to ban the whole Russian Paralympic team from competing in the September games in Rio for failure to abide by the IPC Anti-Doping Code, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Sunday. The Russian Paralympic team has until Aug. 28 to appeal the decision.
“This has without doubt been the hardest decision the IPC has ever had to take,” an IPC email stated. “But it was taken unanimously by the IPC Governing Board after evaluating all the evidence it had before it.”
In a report to the World Anti-Doping Agency, Richard McLaren said that the Russians operated a state-sponsored “sample swapping” cheating system which swapped out dirty urine samples for clean ones. The program ran from 2011 to 2015. Every sample examined showed evidence of the caps being “removed and reused,” the report adds.
“The facts really do hurt,” IPC President Philip Craven told the AP. “They are an unprecedented attack on every clean athlete who competes in sport. The anti-doping system in Russia is broken, corrupted and entirely compromised.”
The head of Russian Paralympic Committee, Mikhail Terentyev, told the AP he feels this decision is a “huge injustice.”
The IPC says they expect to find even more evidence of doping beyond what the McLaren report was able to uncover.
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