MOSCOW, November 30. /TASS/. The Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC) has submitted an application for 100 of its athletes to take part in the 2024 World Para Athletics Championships in Japan, RPC President Pavel Rozhkov said on Thursday.

"We have submitted an application to participate in the track and field world championship next year in Japan. It includes 100 of our guys," Rozhkov told journalists. "We did this during an intermission of the session [of the International Paralympic Committee General Assembly in Bahrein]. It was our last chance to do this."

The 2024 World Para Athletics Championships for Paralympic track and field athletes is scheduled to be held in Kobe, Japan on May 17-25, 2024.

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) General Assembly at its September 27 meeting in Bahrain ruled against suspending the RPC from the IPC and also cleared Russian Para athletes to take part in international competition, but only as neutrals.

The Russian athletes were allowed to participate under a neutral status in the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games, which will be held in Paris between August 28 and September 8, 2024. RPC chief Rozhkov later said that some 300 Russian Para athletes might participate in the 2024 Paralympics.

On November 16, 2022, the IPC Extraordinary General Assembly voted to suspend the Russian Paralympic Committee’s membership in the organization. The RPC filed a motion with the Appeals Tribunal on December 26, 2022 contesting the IPC General Assembly’s ruling and the appeal was met.

RPC’s ongoing spat with IPC

On August 7, 2016, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) decided to bar the entire Russian team from taking part in the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on August 23, 2016 upheld the IPC’s ruling that had come on the heels of a report delivered a month earlier by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Independent Commission, chaired by Canadian sports law professor Richard McLaren, which substantiated doping allegations involving Russian Paralympians.

Besides collectively punishing the Russian national team by banning it from the Rio Games, the IPC also decided to suspend the RPC’s membership in the international organization.

However, the team of Russian athletes, led by RPC head Pavel Rozhkov, was allowed to participate in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where it finished in 4th place in the overall medals standings among the rest of the national participants.

Para athletes from Russia also participated in the 2018 Paralympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, with a neutral status, dubbed as the Neutral Paralympic Athletes (NPA), given that the RPC’s membership in the IPC was still suspended at the time.

Russia’s so-called "neutral" team of Para athletes brought home a total of 24 medals from PyeongChang, including eight gold, 10 silver and six bronze, ranking second in the overall medal count at the 2018 PyeongChang Paralympics, after only the US national team.