Russia bids to avoid Rio ban as IOC reports new test failures

Do not know why.... but Russia somehow equates Olympic Medal Wins with Power overall. So winning a medal in the Olympics becomes extremely important.... to the point that they have cheated far too often to get them. The IOC needs to uphold the ban on Russians in order to protect the integrity of the Games.

It does suck for the individual Russian athletes who haven't been involved in doping. But in reality the collective ban makes a lot of sense to give Russia the clear signal that they ought to stop screwing around and fully cooperate with the IOC. The individual athletes anger is really misdirected, and really should be directed at their own government for not taking action sooner in cleaning up their act.

Seems even the Russian paralympics team didn't comply with anti doping regulations in place! Pure greed.

Although I think Russia have clearly institutionalized doping in most sports and should pay for this, other nations aren't squeaky clean either and are just happy Russia's the perfect scapegoat they needed. How many of the 50-60 athletes caught this week (from 2008 and 2012 olympics doping tests) are from other nations than russsia? We should know next week but I reckon a few of them will be from countries currently putting the boot in.

Read this week that 15 south african rugbymen recently tested positive, a couple play SR others not even. Doping is everywhere, Russia like Lance Armstrong, Gatlin (caught twice) etc just pushed it a little too far.

Better check the Chinese too!

Just BAN the whole Olympics, its all about greed, cheating & $$$!

If they really want to be serious about doping, they should have mandatory doping tests before all sporting events. If they fail, they are banned for that event, and perhaps more. Also, the medal winners should have mandatory doping tests. Again, if they fail, they are stripped of their medal, and banned for the next event. The costs of the tests to be born by the athlete's country.

“Alas, everything that is happening with our sports is the fruit of our own errors,” a column in the usually pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda said, citing years of mismanagement.

That's the first step in fixing the system - taking ownership of own mistakes, instead of blaming others.

It's one level when athletes try to cheat the anti-doping national system by themselves. It's a whole another level when it's the national system itself that's aiding the athletes to cheat. The latter is a lot more serious and damaging across the board.

Ya can punish the athletes who cheat by themselves thru banning them individually. But how do ya punish a system that cheats by national systematically?

Russia is being punished for creating a state-sponsored system to mask doping to cover a large number of athletes. The punishment is going to be different than a random athlete taking a banned substance and getting caught.

It's just unfortunate for the clean ones, but they can blame Putin for that. My guess is that Putin will blame someone else.