From Inside the Games
German Athletics Federation (DLV) President Clemens Prokop has criticised the arguments of compatriot Thomas Bach, while calling for the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to be suspended until the country’s doping problems are resolved.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Bach has repeatedly rejected such a notion on the grounds that the ROC were not specifically mentioned as being directly implicated in the McLaren Report’s damning evidence of a state-sponsored doping programme.
This was allegedly in operation at events including the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Rather than introducing a suspension, responsibility for Russian eligibility at August’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was instead handed to specific International Federations before being ratified by a three-person IOC panel.
Bach defended this decision last week in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the grounds that they must base their reasoning on “law and legislation” because this is a “major achievement of modern democracy”.
He rejected claims that the IOC have behaved inconsistently because they have suspended other National Olympic Committees, such as Kuwait, specifically due to the actions of the Government.
He also claimed the IOC’s position was different to that of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), who did suspend the All-Russia Athletic Federation, on the grounds that “the IAAF has to resolve its specific problem of members of its former leadership participating in this system”, which “distinguishes it from all other federations and the IOC”.
But Prokop, a frequent critic of IOC policy who also wrote an open letter to Bach urging stronger sanctions on Russia in June, has now claimed that there were plenty of grounds in the Olympic Charter to justify such a suspension.
“If the values of the Charter of the IOC are taken seriously, the NOC of Russia would have to be suspended by the IOC until the solution of its doping problem, for the protection of all concerned athletes and fair play,” he wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
