Of course, it's a rigged system when you have to try to "prove" your innocence and overcome frame-jobs concocted by jealous traitors anyway, but when Russia is there to Western ears, anything is on the table. But now after the Swiss Federal Court denied the IOC's last gasp hope to keep up career-destroying bans on Russian athletes, they'll unlikely to even bother with the 27 remaining. After all, the desired geopolitical damage has been done, who cares about truth to individuals in the end?
The athletes' good names might be restored now, but they had all been handed lengthy disqualifications and missed out on the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang last year.
The harsh measures were introduced after an Olympic disciplinary panel accused the Russians of being part of a state-run doping program, based on claims by former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov, who fled to the US in 2015 and is wanted at home on several charges.
German legal firm Wieschemann Lawyers said in a statement on Saturday that “there is no factual evidence for the allegations made by Dr. Rodchenkov regarding the events in Sochi.” It also insisted that the International Olympic committee “seriously violated the procedural rights of the athletes and even withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and the court.”
“We could in the panel that in some very important details Dr. Rodchenkov lied in the procedure as a witness,” Christof Wieschemann, the lawyer for Russian cross country skier Alexander Legkov, whom the IOC tried to deprive of his gold and silver Olympic medals.
Wieschemann said that since January 2017 he has filed “no fewer than five written requests” to IOC for evidence against his client, but was never shown any.
He insisted that he has “confirmation” that the Olympic officials re-tested the samples of the accused Russian athletes in late 2016 and that they all returned “negative results.”
The lawyer also said that the chain of custody, which traces the doping test’s route from athlete to the laboratory and beyond, contradicted Rodchenkov’s claims.
After being unable to compete for two years, Legkov decided to retire from sports in April last year in order to concentrate on his projects outside the track, including being a lawmaker in the Moscow Region. He now only takes part in amateur skiing competitions. It’s unclear if the 35-year-old is going to sue the IOC over false accusations against him.