By Daily Sports on December 5, 2017

International Olympics Committee (IOC) will today (Tuesday) evening decide whether Russia will be banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

IOC president, Thomas Bach will meet with his board members at the organisation’s headquarters in Lausanne Tuesday to decide on Russia fate, just 66 days before Pyeongchang 2018 starts on 9 February.

The German and his board will have spent the afternoon poring over the findings and recommendations of a 16-month investigation headed up by the former president of Switzerland, Samuel Schmid.

His team have been looking into the allegations of government involvement in the cheating when Russia hosted the last Winter Games in Sochi in 2014, and deciding whether there is enough evidence to conclude that this is indeed what happened, despite repeated denials.

On the eve of the 2016 Rio Games, the IOC came under huge pressure to ban the Russian team from the Olympics after an independent report by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren concluded the country had engaged in a state-sponsored doping conspiracy that benefitted 1,000 athletes across 30 sports between 2012 and 2015.

Despite this, the IOC could not bring itself to do so, handing responsibility for sanctions to the various international sporting federations, meaning hundreds of athletes competed, and 56 medals were won.

Re-tests of Russian athletes' samples, meanwhile, resulted in a host of retrospective bans and stripping of medals, costing the country its position at the top of the Sochi 2014 medal table.

Twenty five Russians have now been banned in the last month.

•Photo shows Russian athletes in action.

Source Daily Sports

Posted December 5, 2017

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