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Doping scandal in Russian sports

IOC bans for life six players from Russian national women’s ice hockey team

The International Olympic Committee has published new decisions from the Oswald Commission hearings

© Ruslan Shamukov/TASS

MOSCOW, December 12. /TASS/. The Disciplinary Commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced its decision on Tuesday to ban for life six players from the Russian national women’s ice hockey team.

"The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has published new decisions from the Oswald Commission hearings, which are being conducted in the context of the Sochi 2014 forensic and analytic doping investigations," the IOC said in its statement.

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"As a result, six Russian ice hockey players, Inna Dyubanok, Ekaterina Lebedeva, Ekaterina Pashkevich, Anna Shibanova, Ekaterina Smolentseva and Galina Skiba, have been sanctioned," the statement added.

According to the IOC, "the six athletes are declared ineligible to be accredited in any capacity for all editions of the Games of the Olympiad and the Olympic Winter Games subsequent to the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014," and they are also "disqualified from the events in which they participated" at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The IOC also announced that it had been dropped a case in regard to another member of the Russian national women’s ice hockey team, but decided against disclosing the name of the athlete at the issue.

"In addition to these six decisions, the IOC Disciplinary Commission has issued a seventh decision in which it found that the elements in the file and the conclusions of the investigations conducted so far were not sufficient to establish an anti-doping rule violation," the IOC statement said.

"Accordingly, the disciplinary proceedings opened against the athlete were terminated and the case filed," according to the IOC. "In order to protect the rights of the athlete, the identity of the athlete concerned will not be disclosed and the decision will not be published at this point in time."

The Denis Oswald-led commission had carried out retests of Russian athletes’ doping samples collected at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and, as a result, already cancelled the results of 25 athletes from their home Games.

Based on the commissions' findings, the IOC Executive Board announced its decision on December 5 to suspend the Russian national team from taking part in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea’s PyeongChang.

The IOC, however, stated that doping-free athletes from Russia could go to the 2018 Olympic Games under the classification of neutral athletes, or the OAR status, which stands for ‘Olympic Athlete from Russia.’

The IOC Executive Board also announced last week that the ROC was to reimburse the costs incurred by the IOC for the probes and to contribute to the establishment of an Independent Testing Authority (ITA), which carries a price tag of $15 million.

The world’s governing Olympic body stated that not only did it ban Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko and ex-Sports Minister Yury Nagornykh from attending all Olympic events in their official capacities, but it also yanked the membership of the ROC and its President Zhukov. A number of additional sanctions against other Russian sports officials followed from the IOC as well.

The upcoming Olympics, which are 23rd Winter Games, will take place in South Korea’s PyeongChang on February 9-25, 2018.

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