The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has upheld the ban on Russia's track and field team, according to the president of All-Russia Athletic Federation, Dmitry Shlyakhtin, who spoke to RT. That means the Russian athletes will likely not compete at this summer's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The decision is set to be officially announced at an IAAF meeting in Vienna later on Friday.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) first made allegations against Russia in November 2015, accusing the country’s athletics and anti-doping bodies of massively breaching anti-doping rules. The IAAF suspended Russia in November over the accusations.

The head of the Russian Olympic Committee, Aleksandr Zhukov, had said on Wednesday that the All-Russia Athletic Federation (ARAF) was ready to become a member again as it has met over 40 conditions set forth by the IAAF to be accepted back.

Russian athletes are now left wondering what the decision will mean for their careers.

Triple jump athlete Aleksey Fyodorov, 25, speaking before the decision, said: “I’ve dreamt of the Olympics since childhood, every day. I’m proud of my work, of my dad and trainer. It would be very frustrating to miss my chance because of others.”

Daniil Tsiplakov, 24, a high-jump athlete, has been training for 15 years.

“Our sole task is to keep training. We are hoping we'll be allowed to the Olympics, we are ready to win,” he told RT.

Russia’s Olympic Committee had stood up for the athletes, writing to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and asking the body to allow those who didn’t use doping to compete.

“These athletes are the majority in Russia. They try to reach their goal – participation in the Olympic Games – due to their hard work and constant training.”

The commission also addressed IOC President Thomas Bach directly, hoping that “the great history and the contribution of [Russia] in the Olympics won’t be crossed out.”

“We are convinced that the ban on the participation of Russian athletes in the Olympic Games can cause a destructive impact on the Olympic values system and irreparable damage to the development of sport in Russia. We’re asking you and the IOC to treat with humanity those many athletes whose fates are now at stake, and take a balanced and wise decision,” the letter read.

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko also wrote an open letter to IAAF head Sebastian Coe, so that the world knows that “Russian sport is healthy and clean, and not like it is shown abroad.”

“Clean athletes who have dedicated years of their lives to training and who never sought to gain unfair advantage through doping should not be punished for the past actions of other individuals,'' Mutko wrote in his letter to Coe.

“Additionally, Russia's athletes must not be singled out as the only ones to be punished for a problem that is widely acknowledged to go far beyond our country's borders.”

However, these efforts now appear to have been in vain. 

The IOC vice-president, John Coates, had criticized Russia's anti-doping agency and athletics body ahead of the decision.

"Presenting an Olympic medal is always an honour," Coates, who is also president of the Australian Olympic Committee, said at a ceremony in Melbourne, when he belatedly awarded a London 2012 Olympics gold medal to Australia's Jared Tallent.

Tallent was promoted from silver after Sergey Kirdyapkin, who claimed gold at the Olympics in 2012, was accused of doping.

"But more so on this occasion to be part of rectifying, in some way, the massive injustice perpetrated on Jared by a doping cheat and aided by a Russian Anti-Doping Agency and Russian Athletics Federation that were rotten to the core."

The situation had become all the more difficult for Russia after the latest WADA report, claiming that hundreds of attempts to conduct drug tests on Russian athletes this year have been prevented by armed security forces.

Drug testers couldn’t carry out the tests and athletes evaded doping control, the report added.

At the center of the Russian doping scandal is also the use of meldonium, a drug that was banned in January.

Some experts think that the focus on meldonium is hypocrisy, and that there are other, more powerful stimulants that are allowed.

“For 10 years or so, meldonium wasn’t on the ban list, and it was completely legal to use. Then, by January 1, they decided to ban the previously legal drug, and it [became] a sporting crime to use it,” said Verner Moeller, who works at the Department of Public Health - Sport Science at Aarhus University, Denmark.

“The list includes many drugs that don’t have any real effect and on the other hand we have creatine and caffeine which are true performance enhancers that are not on the list. There is nothing we can do about this since it is only up to WADA,” Moeller told RT.

His opinion is echoed by another expert, Boris Simkhovich, M.D., Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Research Medicine at the Department of Medicine, the University of Southern California.

“There have been no studies confirming meldonium can act as a performance enhancer. Additionally, there is a medicine trimetazodine developed in France, it works close to meldonium but it has some gimmicks. Trimetazodine has also been included to the WADA list. However, L-carnitine, widely used by athletes as a supplement, doesn't appear on this list, and everybody knows that athletes, and even people who feel weak and want to enhance their performance, use L-carnitine,” he told RT.

(RT)