“The main topic of yesterday’s negotiations of our working group with colleagues from the International Olympic Committee was, of course, the list of Russian athletes whom the IOC is ready to invite in Pyeongchang, said Stanislav Pozdnyakov. We initially proceeded from the immutable rights of all clean athletes to participate in the Olympic games. A day before we received the list. And unfortunately, a number of leading Russian athletes in several sports were removed from it.
These athletes, such as, for example, Viktor Ahn, Anton Shipulin, Sergey Ustyugov were not involved in the investigation of the of Oswald Commission, they have never been implicated in any doping stories, and all those numerous tests they have gone through in their career prove that they are clean athletes. However, currently their names are not in the list of potential participants of the Games.
Today we will send an official request to the IOC to give specific reasons for the exclusion of some leading athletes from the list of potential participants of the Olympic Games.
In accordance with the decisions of the Executive Committee, the IOC has the exclusive right to invite or not to invite certain athletes. However, these reasons must be justified and explained to the athletes.
We worked a lot on the other items on the agenda of negotiations, concerning technical and organizational issues, but now the first item on the agenda is the composition of our team.
At the moment all information is still preliminary, I would like to emphasize that. Today we will discuss the situation with sports federations and we will continue our dialogue with the IOC, after which final decisions will be taken”.
