The Court of Arbitration for Sport has dismissed an appeal by 47 Russian athletes and coaches against a ban on participation in the Winter Olympics. The Russian had argued that they had been wrongfully excluded from the Games by the International Olympic Committee.
That decision was made just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony.
This comes amid a long-running over Russian doping which saw the country banned from the games, but 169 Russians will compete as independents. The group that is contesting the decision included 28 athletes who had life bans from the Olympics lifted by the IOC last week, when CAS ruled there was insufficient evidence they had benefited from a system of state-sponsored doping.
The IOC made the decision not to extend an invitation to those with overturned bans- saying the decision “had not lifted the suspicion of doping”.
In its decision to uphold the ban on entry to the Pyeongchang Games, the CAS panel did not find that the IC process was “discriminatory, arbitrary or unfair”.
As a result of that, none of the affected athlete will complete in the 2018 Winter Olympics, which run from 9 to 25 February in South Korea.
The ban on Russia was handed down after an investigation into state-sponsored doping during the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi in Russia.
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