GENEVA: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will decide on Dec 5 if Russia can compete at the Pyeongchang Winter Games.
Russia faces being banned from the Feb 9-25 games in South Korea as punishment for state-backed doping at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
The IOC said on Friday that a “decision with regard to the participation of Russian athletes in the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 will be taken” by its executive board on the opening day of a Dec 5-6 meeting in its home city of Lausanne.
IOC president Thomas Bach was scheduled to announce the decision at a news conference starting later on Friday.
Bach has criticised sport officials who call for a total ban on Russia, which could be offered sanctions that would allow some athletes to compete if they also have met stricter standards of doping controls.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said it would be “degrading” for its athletes to take part in the Winter Games as a neutral team and be denied their national flag and anthem.
That happened in August at the athletics world championships, where some Russian athletes won medals despite the Russian athletics body being suspended by the IAAF in fallout from the doping scandals.
The IOC board is awaiting reports from two commissions it created to verify evidence detailed by World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Richard McLaren last year, weeks before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
One panel led by IOC board member Denis Oswald is prosecuting around 30 individual Russian athletes who are suspected of doping violations at Sochi. There, tainted samples were swapped with clean urine in the WADA-accredited testing laboratory.
Six cross-country skiers, including two medalists, have already been disqualified by Oswald’s three-man panel and banned from the Olympics for life. They plan appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
A second IOC panel is studying whether Russian state agencies, including the sports ministry and FSB security service, were involved in the doping program. That commission is chaired by Samuel Schmid, a former president of Switzerland.
The case for Russia to stay in the Pyeongchang Olympics got tougher this week when WADA declined to re-accredit the reformed national anti-doping agency known as RUSADA.
Russian authorities refuse to acknowledge there was a state conspiracy to corrupt the Sochi Olympics a key condition insisted on by WADA.
“It is clear that an unconditional recognition of the McLaren Report is impossible,” Russian IOC member Alexander Zhukov told the WADA meeting on Thursday in Seoul.
Russia blames individuals for the doping programme, and wants whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov the former director of the Moscow and Sochi labs to be extradited from the US.
Rodchenkov is in a witness protection programme after fleeing to the US and alleging to American media last year how the Sochi doping system worked.
‘HUMILIATING TO GO TO OLYMPICS WITHOUT FLAG’
Meanwhile according to a RIA news agency report, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko said that it would be unacceptable and humiliating for Russia to take part in the Winter Olympics in South Korea without the national flag and anthem.
Mutko said Russia is ready to cooperate with the World Anti-Doping Agency, but the other side should show willing too.
Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2017
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