Following a meeting of the IOC's executive board in Lausanne on Monday, IOC President Thomas Bach announced a series of sanctions against Russia over evidence of systematic, state-sponsored doping outlined in a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report compiled by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren.
From Deutsche Welle, Dec 6, 2017 President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will not prevent athletes from competing at the 2018 Winter Games under the Olympic flag. The statement came a day after the IOC banned the country over a doping scandal. Just hours after a Kremlin spokesman said Moscow would take some time to consider its response to the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) decision to ban Russia from the Olympic Games, President Vladimir Putin (pictured above) confirmed that his country's athletes would be free to compete. "We will certainly not declare any boycott, we will not prevent our Olympians from competing, if they want to take part in a personal capacity," Russian news agencies quoted him as saying during a speech at an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, where he also announced he would run for a fourth term in the 2018 presidential election. […] http://p.dw.com/p/2ot3N
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