The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has not disqualified the Russian national team from the participation in Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The president of the Committee, Thomas Bach, made this statement during a conference call.
However, only 'clean athletes' will be able to participate in the Olympic Games and the final decision on their admission will be made by sporting federations.
Russian athletes have 12 days to receive a chance to participate in the the Olympics. During this period they will have to prove that they did not use doping and obtain a permission from the corresponding federations.
At the same time, those athletes who have ever been caught in doping will be disqualified from the Olympics.
Earlier, Los Angeles Times published a letter that was delivered to the editorial office.
We can not allow to use the Olympic Games as a confrontation between the West and Russia.
In ancient Greece, the warring city-states stopped the war at the time of the Olympic Games. These sporting competitions stopped bloodshed on the battlefields. This ideal of peaceful competition among participants was the key principle of the modern Olympic movement.
The International Olympic Committee should not betray this principle by disqualification of the Russian National team from the Olympics in Rio.
Doping is a problem of the modern sports, and of course, Russian sports officials behaved inadmissibly. But on the other hand, they are not the only ones who do this. Only Russia has been undergone the investigation and disqualified out of twelve countries that were included in the initial list of suspect,. We deceive ourselves. If deny themselves if we say that the main reason is the fact that Russia is the main geopolitical enemy of the West. Olympics is becoming an instrument of isolation and humiliation of the longtime enemy instead of being a bridge that connects the countries.
Isolation of a single country, the punishment of the innocent and ignoring violations by other countries will not help make the sport clean from doping. On the contrary it discredits the Olympic movement and increase chances that the next round of confrontation will take place on the battlefield instead of the stadium.
