MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected an Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC) appeal against the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) ban on Russia's participation in the September 7-18 Rio Paralympics. The ban will also apply to the 2018 Winter Paralympics in South Korea's Pyeongchang.
The ban was mainly influenced by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) McLaren report on the widespread use of performance enhancing substances by Russian athletes. The report, however, hardly mentioned Russian Paralympic athletes, apart from in relation to a list of 35 allegedly disappeared doping samples.
"We will not keep it [the situation with Russia's Paralympic athletes] the way it is. Courts have already started legal proceedings. We will also discuss such activities in the United Nations, because the principle 'sport out of politics' approved by the UN General Assembly has been violated. Sport can not be a sphere, where discrimination of any kind is applied. And here is an obvious national origin discrimination, discrimination against one's citizenship," Lavrov said Tuesday.
He added that people, who had made decisions to ban the national team had inflicted serious damage to the athletes themselves.
