Earlier this week, Dmitry Shlyakhtin, president of the All-Russia Athletics Federation, announced that 42 Russian track and field athletes will be compensated a total 40 million rubles (about $620,000) for their Rio Olympic disqualifications.
“Financial compensation will be paid to 42 athletes and payments will be made to them simultaneously,” he said. “The size of compensations will depend on the result a particular athlete could have achieved at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.”
Shlyakhtin did not mention the exact amount that each athlete would receive, but he did mention that four or five athletes who would have been in gold medal contention would “get a very good compensation.”
However, the Russian news agency TASS, is reporting that the Russian Olympic Committee will pay four million rubles (about $62,000) to three athletes. The reported reward matches the payment allocated to Rio gold medalists. According the the TASS’s anonymous source within the Russian Olympic Committee, the athletes receiving the top monetary reward will include two-time Olympic champion pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, 2015 world champion hurdler Sergey Shubenkov, and 2015 high jump world champion Maria Kuchin.
The Russian track and field team (minus long-jumper Darya Klishina) was banned from competition at this summer’s Rio Olympics following evidence of Russian state-sponsored doping uncovered by the McLaren report.
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