IOC president says Russia will face sanctions even after antidoping measures were taken

Thomas Bach acknowledged efforts from Russia, but “cannot forget what happened” in Sochi.

Despite Russia’s best efforts to make it a crime to facilitate doping, the International Olympic Committee will not free the nation of all sanctions, according to the New York Times.

“We have the impression that some in Russia were thinking by addressing the issues for the future, the past would be forgotten,” Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC said to the New York Times Tuesday.

“You cannot forget what happened in Sochi,” Bach said. “We have made clear that the past — what happened there — has to be sanctioned.”

Bach would not give specifics on what the punishment would look like for Russia. According to the Times, he cited the ongoing work of two Olympic commissions that are “scrutinizing the implicated athletes and government officials.”

The commissions are examining evidence from Richard McLaren, who spent 2016 corroborating testimony of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia’s former national antidoping lab chief. Prior to the 2016 Rio Olympics, Dr. Rodchenkov laid out how he and Russia’s Federal Security Service helped their Olympians use banned performance-enchancing steroids in the 2014 Sochi Games.

“We want to get this done as soon as possible,” Bach said. “To come to the appropriate sanction, we have to find out how deep this system of manipulation was rooted.”

Vladimir Putin ordered that Russia adopt the recommendations of a national antidoping commission to restore the nation to good standing. Yet it hasn’t been enough for Bach to look the other way.

“We saw on the one hand the president of Russia saying, ‘Yes we had this problem, we have to admit this,’” Mr. Bach said. “You have on the other side some government officials or parliamentarians trying to ignore everything.”

The IOC has been dealing with this issue dating back to July of 2016. They considered banning all Russian athletes at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. A congressional hearing was also held in February to examine the international anti-doping system ahead of the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang.