RUSSIANS TO STAGE THEIR OWN SPORTS DAY
RUSSIA’S defiance of international outrage was expressed again yesterday with the news that the country will stage its own mini-Olympics today. The ‘Stars 2016’ tournament will take place in Moscow at the Znamensky Brothers stadium. The festival of the drugs cheats will include 135 track-and-field athletes — including Olympic champions and medal winners as well as other members of the 68-strong athletics squad who have been excluded from Rio for state-sponsored doping. The defiant sign to the world of clean sport came on the day that Russian president Vladimir Putin accused athletics’ ruling body, the IAAF, of ‘blatant discrimination’ for their blanket ban on its athletes. Putin was speaking as he bade farewell to those Russian competitors who were heading from Moscow to Rio yesterday. Putin said: ‘The ban has gone beyond legal boundaries as well as beyond the point of common sense.’ He castigated the IAAF as ‘short-sighted politicians’ who were not interested in bringing people together. His comments come more than a month after the IAAF, led by Lord Coe, took the strongest possible stance against doping. The IAAF-imposed ban was upheld last week by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, to the relief of campaigners for fair competition. Despite this, the disgraced Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko wrote a personal letter to Coe in an 11th-hour plea for leniency. Mutko said that he accepted the IAAF decision was ‘well-grounded and a consequence of a serious crisis in the management of the All-Russian Athletics Federation, as well as a deep-rooted doping problem that goes back to Soviet times’. But Mutko added: ‘Russia’s position remains unaltered and shows absolute zero tolerance to doping.’ He argued that violations of the doping code should be ‘personalised, and all conscientious athletes should not be responsible for violations of others’. He cited ‘great figures such as pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva’ as being of ‘an impeccable reputation’ and the ‘new generation’ of high jumper Mariya Kuchina and sprint hurdler Sergey Shubenkov as athletes ‘who have sacrificed years of training to compete in Rio’. Coe was unimpressed by the Russian attempt to inveigle their way in.