The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has upheld appeals by 27 Russian athletes accused of doping violations and partially upheld appeals by a dozen more.
The athletes themselves were winter Olympians implicated in Russia’s state-sponsored doping program that compromised the Moscow anti-doping laboratory by swapping out urine samples to protect Russian athletes. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had stripped the implicated athletes of their results at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, but CAS ruled that the IOC didn’t have enough evidence to hand down such a punishment.
In 27 cases, CAS found that “the evidence collected was not sufficient to establish the existence of an anti-doping rule violation” and upheld the athletes’ appeals. That reinstated their results for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
In 29 other cases, CAS found that there was enough evidence to establish “a manipulation of the urine samples.” However, CAS still partially upheld the athletes’ appeals, banning them not for life, but from the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics only.
CAS says the evidence against the athletes in question had to not only establish that Russia had a sample-swapping program in place, but to prove that the athlete was “personally and knowingly implicated” in swapping out his or her urine sample. CAS did release copies of two of its decisions: one from the group of 27 upheld appeals and one from the group of 12 partially-upheld appeals. You can read them below.
Let me translate the CAS decision:
“We know Russia was doing it and forced everyone to do it, but did YOU do it?”
“No.”
“Good enough for me!”