Rain was in the forecast as the Russian track and field championships began outside Moscow on Wednesday, but that was not the only cloud hanging over competitors. On Thursday, the court of arbitration for sport will decide whether to allow 68 Russian track and field athletes to participate in the Rio Olympics after findings of widespread performance-enhancing drug use.
“Of course it was sad, it has been the whole year,” said Sergei Litvinov, who won the hammer throw at the championships on Wednesday. “The youth are OK, they don’t really feel it, it’s the older ones and the rest of team that understand what’s going on. There’s nothing to be happy about.”
Asked what decision he expected from Cas, Litvinov said: “It’s hard to expect anything. We’ve already expected so many things, so many decisions, now we don’t expect anything, we just hope. It will go as it goes.”
The governing body of world athletics, the IAAF, suspended Russia in November following an investigation that found systematic doping by Russian competitors at the London Olympics and elsewhere. More reports followed, and on Monday a commission led by the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren found the Russian government directed and covered up performance-enhancing drug use at the Sochi Olympics and other competitions. On Tuesday, the International Olympic Committee said it would wait until after the Cas ruling and explore “legal options” before deciding on whether to ban the entire country from Rio.
This has left Russian athletes across all sports in limbo, training for an Olympics they may not be able to attend. On Wednesday, the Russian Olympic Committee unveiled its final list of 367 athletes for Rio, including the 68 appealing against the track and field suspension at Cas, even though the team’s fate remains unclear.
“Of course we’re worried, but it’s not up to us to decide,” said the artistic gymnast Viktoria Komova, who won team and individual silver medals at the London Games.
The volleyball player Alexander Volkov, who won a gold medal with his team in London, said: “Nothing depends on us, we are just waiting for decision. The situation is unpleasant but we can’t do anything about it. It’s not 100% sure that we won’t go, so we continue to prepare, to train. Our schedule hasn’t changed. We just have to watch less TV.”
Asked what would happen if the entire country was banned, Volkov said: “It would hurt, but I believe it will all turn out [all right].”
The two-times Olympic gold-medallist pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva has been representing the 68 Russian athletes at Cas. The Russian Olympic Committee head, Alexander Zhukov, said in court she had “rightly asked who will defend her rights as a clean athlete who never doped”. “I think that’s a very serious argument in favour of our athletes at the Olympic Games,” he told journalists on Wednesday.
Russian officials all the way up to the president, Vladimir Putin, have decried the McLaren report as an unfounded attack on Russia, and athletes including the diver Viktor Minibayev told the Guardian they viewed the doping allegations as political.
“You will always find what you search for,” said the European champion hurdler Irina Davydova, who is not in the team while she recovers from an injury. “I think it’s a political attack on our country from all sides, and on sport, because it’s an Olympics year.”
Litvinov said the doping allegations initially disturbed his training and ruined his concentration. The hammer thrower has been competing since his teenage years, training under his father, Sergei Litvinov Sr, who won gold in the hammer throw at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. A European champion, the younger Litvinov now does not know if he will make it to his first Olympics.
“We don’t know what will be tomorrow. It would have been better if we had been banned for two years, for four years, instead of just being banned and not knowing when it will end,” he said.
If Cas rules out Rio for him, Litvinov said he would continue training while also working to end doping in Russia, an issue that he spoke on with unusual candour.
“The problem is that every athlete has thought about this and decided what to do, and I thought about it in my time,” Litvinov said about the choice to dope. “In Britain or anywhere else, an athlete in conditions of tough competition decides which route, either the risky one or the safe but less successful one.”
“I’d like to apologise for all of us, for our citizens that we had such moments of manipulation and so on, that we had these problems, and that people were deceived because of this.”
