IOC Releases Statement on McLaren Report, Condemns “Fundamental Attack”

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Photo Courtesy: James Lang/USA TODAY Sports

The International Olympic Committee released a statement Friday in response to Canadian professor Richard McLaren releasing the second part of his investigation into Russia’s state-sponsored doping program, which it refers to as a “fundamental attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and on sports in general.”

Read the statement in full below:

The IOC thanks Prof. McLaren and his team for the completed Independent Person (IP) report and acknowledges the evidence produced. The detailed findings show that there was a fundamental attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and on sports in general.

The cooperation between the IOC and Prof. McLaren, as indicated in the report, will continue. The IOC appreciates Prof. McLaren’s commitment to support the two Commissions set up by the IOC on 19 July 2016.

As Prof. McLaren notes: “The IP is not a Results Management Authority under the World Anti-Doping Code and therefore does not have the authority to bring forward Anti-Doping Rule Violation (ADRV) cases against individual athletes. (…) It will be up to each Results Management Authority to determine whether the provided strands of evidence, standing alone or together build a sufficiently strong cable to support an ADRV in an individual case.”

The IOC has already established two commissions to prepare the appropriate sanctions and measures:

An Inquiry Commission, chaired by the former President of Switzerland, Samuel Schmid, is addressing the “institutional conspiracy across summer and winter sports athletes who participated with Russian officials within the Ministry of Sport and its infrastructure, such as RUSADA, CSP and the Moscow Laboratory along with the FSB”, in particular with regard to the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014.

A Disciplinary Commission, chaired by IOC Member Denis Oswald, is addressing the question of doping and manipulation of samples concerning the Russian athletes who participated in the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014. In the context of this Disciplinary Commission, all the samples of all Russian athletes who participated in Sochi will be re-analysed. The re-analysis will be to establish whether there was doping or whether the samples themselves were manipulated.

The IOC will re-analyse all 254 urine samples collected from Russian athletes at the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014, since Prof. McLaren’s mandate did not include a full re-analysis of all these samples. All 63 blood samples collected from Russian athletes at the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014 have already been re-analysed by the IOC in cooperation with Prof. McLaren, and were all negative.

The IOC has extended the mandate of the Oswald Commission to examine all samples collected from Russian athletes during the Olympic Games London 2012, following the findings of today’s completed IP Report. Re-analysis of some of these samples is already underway following intelligence provided by Prof. McLaren to the IOC. Eleven Russian athletes have already been sanctioned by the IOC as a result of the IOC’s own re-analysis programme, which began prior to the Olympic Games Rio 2016 and is ongoing.

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Helen oleary

7 years ago

Russian should not a lot too swim in this competition they should be banned
From swimming