This season’s world championships for bobsled and skeleton are being pulled out of Russia after a number of sliders said they would not compete in a nation so enveloped in a doping scandal.
The International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation voted to make its final decision on Tuesday. The move comes less than a week after the a href=’https://www.apnews.com/541592080f77456986c31d2410bc0ac8/Russia’s-lab-wizard-created-drug-cocktails-but-caught-cheats’latest scathing report/a from World Anti-Doping Association investigator Richard McLaren showed the depth of doping and test-tampering by Russia during the 2012 and 2014 Olympic cycles.
These world championships were scheduled to happen over the last two weeks of February in Krasnaya Polyana, Russia, on the track used for the 2014 Sochi Games. A new site is expected to be announced in the coming days.
The IBSF did not rebuke Russian sliding officials any rebuke over what was detailed in report. Instead, the federation said it came to realize that moving worlds was the only way “to allow athletes and coaches from all nations to participate in a competition that focuses on sport rather than accusations and discussions – whether justified or not.”
Some of the world’s best sliders – including reigning Olympic medalists Steven Holcomb, Matt Antoine and Elana Meyers Taylor of the U.S., Martins Dukurs of Latvia and Lizzy Yarnold of Britain – urged the IBSF for weeks to take the extraordinary action. Latvia’s national skeleton team said on Sunday it would boycott if worlds were held in Russia, and Austria and South Korea were also considering such actions.
Put simply, the primary athlete concern about going to Russia for world championships was the integrity of the doping process – with some even voicing worry that the hosts could tamper with food and drink supplies and create a situation where athletes would unknowingly ingest a banned substance. If caught in such a scenario, the athlete would have received a ban long enough to keep him or her from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics.
“It’s a huge risk to take,” Holcomb said late last week.
It won’t be an issue now.
McLaren’s report showed that some Russian gold medalists from the Sochi Games were tainted by the state-sponsored doping program. Russia won gold medals in two-man bobsled, four-man bobsled and men’s skeleton at those Olympics, though none of the athletes who got those victories have been implicated by any known positive or tampered-with tests.