Why is Russia called ROC at the Tokyo Olympics?

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You won’t see the country’s flag above any podiums but the national colors are on the uniforms at the Tokyo Olympics.

Russia is competing under another new name at the Tokyo Olympics, the latest fallout from the Games’ longest-running doping saga.

You won’t see the Russian flag above any podiums but the national colors are on the uniforms.

Doping cases old and new still cast a shadow over the team. Two swimmers from the Tokyo team have been suspended for cases dating back years and two rowers tested positive last month.

REBRANDING RUSSIA

This time it’s not Russia, or even the Olympic Athletes from Russia. It’s the Russian Olympic Committee.

Officially the athletes will represent not their country, but the ROC, and Russia’s name, flag and anthem are banned. Critics point out that it will be hard to spot the difference when Russian teams are wearing full national colors.

The new rules — an evolution of the “OAR” restrictions used at the 2018 Winter Olympics — are a confusing patchwork of dos and don’ts.

Russian red, white and blue on uniforms are fine — the blocks of color on the official tracksuits form one big flag — but not the word “Russia,” the flag itself or other national symbols. The artistic swimming team said it’s been blocked from wearing costumes with a drawing of a bear.

Official Olympic paperwork and TV graphics will attribute Russian results to “ROC” but won’t spell out the Russian Olympic Committee’s name in full. Gold medalists will get music by Russian composer Tchaikovsky instead of the country’s national anthem.

NEARLY AT FULL STRENGTH

Despite the name change, Russia will have a nearly full team at the Olympics after sending depleted squads to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games.

This time, only track and field and weightlifting will impose limits on Russian squad size. They are the two sports with the largest numbers of doping cases — from Russia and elsewhere — in recent Olympics. Russian officials have selected a 10-person track team that includes three world champions.

Russia is sending more than 330 athletes to Tokyo, with the exact number still unclear because of uncertainty surrounding the rowing team. That’s about 50 more than in 2016, when the doping-related restrictions hit harder across multiple sports, but still the second-lowest number since the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The team ranges from 16-year-old gymnast Viktoria Listunova to 56-year-old dressage rider Inessa Merkulova.

The ROC team is targeted to finish third in the medal count and gold medals are expected in Russia’s usual strongest sports like gymnastics, artistic swimming, wrestling, fencing and judo.

Only Russian athletes in track and field have had to undergo special vetting of their drug-testing histories or possible involvement in past cover-ups. World Athletics has its own sanctions against Russia, including an “authorized neutral athlete” certification program. Only athletes with that status were eligible for Tokyo.

Weightlifting has its own system of doping sanctions, restricting team sizes based on past misdeeds. Russia can enter one male and one female lifter for Tokyo, but avoids the outright bans from Olympic weightlifting imposed on the most persistent offenders like Thailand and Romania.

DOPING DISPUTES

The latest rules on Russia’s name and image were set last year by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in a ruling that satisfied almost nobody.

As so often with Russia, the sanctions aren’t as much about doping as about the cover-up.

Just when Russia was patching up relations with the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2019 by allowing it access to the Moscow anti-doping lab’s files, WADA investigators spotted strange anomalies in the data. Evidence had been deleted and spurious information added, including fake messages designed to tarnish the name of WADA’s star witness, former lab director Grigory Rodchenkov.

WADA said the edits were made while the lab was sealed off by a Russian law enforcement body. Russia denied wrongdoing.

The CAS ruling was hailed as a partial victory in Russia, which had its initial four-year sanction cut to two. It was criticized by some anti-doping figures who wanted neutral-color uniforms at the Olympics and stricter vetting to ensure doping suspects couldn’t compete.

NEW CASES

Russia was back to court ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, but on a smaller scale than its big legal battles from 2016 and 2018.

Swimming governing body FINA had provisionally suspended swimmers Alexander Kudashev and Veronika Andrusenko because of evidence from WADA’s investigation of the Moscow lab data. But CAS on Sunday cleared both swimmers to compete at the Games.

Japan surges to gymnastics lead; Reigning champ Uchimura out

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Kohei Uchimura, of Japan, falls from the horizontal bar during the men’s artistic gymnastic qualifications at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 24, 2021, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

TOKYO (AP) — Kohei Uchimura’s gymnastics career is nearly over. The Japanese star can take solace knowing that the sport the two-time Olympic champion led to glory appears to be in good hands in his home country.

Daiki Hashimoto topped Olympic qualifying on Saturday, putting on a show inside the largely empty Ariake Gymnastics Centre to help Japan sprint to the top of the leaderboard.

Hashimoto’s all-around total of 88.531 pushed Japan past rivals China and ROC, as the Russian team is known, to the top spot in qualifying. The Japanese will bid Monday night for an Olympic title to back up the one they captured in Rio de Janeiro five years ago.

“Passing the qualification round (in first), you know, really (puts pressure on other teams),” Hashimoto said.

The party, however, will go on without Uchimura. Competing as an individual on high bar — his signature event — the 32-year-old widely considered to be the greatest men’s gymnast of all time fell midway through his routine and will not advance to event finals later in the Games.

With fans banned, the small crowd of onlookers — most of them coaches and administrators from various countries — gasped as Uchimura fell to the mat. He pulled himself up and completed his routine, sticking his dismount. His score of 13.866 was well outside the top eight cutoff for event finals.

The program Uchimura led to Olympic glory, however, seems to be back in form after ceding the spotlight to China and Russia in recent years. Japan’s team total of 262.251 was just ahead of China’s 262.061 and ROC’s 261.945.

The United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Ukraine also advanced to Monday night’s final, when the format switches to “three up/three count.” Teams competed four athletes on each event in qualifying, with each team able to drop the lowest score on a given apparatus.

Americans Brody Malone and three-time Olympian Sam Mikulak reached the all-around finals for the U.S. Malone, the reigning national champion, finished 11th with Mikulak 14th.

The biggest surprise of the day came from ROC gymnast Artur Dalaloyan. Competing on a surgically repaired Achilles tendon in his left leg, Dalaloyan earned an unlikely spot in the all-around final with a score of 85.597, good enough for sixth overall.

It didn’t come easy. The 25-year-old dissolved into tears following his floor exercise routine, overcome by what he’s endured since tearing the Achilles during the European Championships in April.

“I couldn’t control my emotions,” Dalaloyen said through an interpreter. “There’s something that broke inside me.”

Dalaloyan’s ranking as the second ROC gymnast behind reigning world champion Nikita Nagornyy means he’ll compete in the all-around final if his Achilles holds up.

Dalaloyan didn’t decide to attempt to qualify for the all-around until meeting with his coaches on Friday.

“I felt strength and power to compete and decided to compete,” he said. “I keep working for 24 hours a day. For me, the Olympic Games is a really high priority. For most sportsmen and people who do (gymnastics), they don’t have the chance to be here. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Even if the injury prevented him from putting on the show he wanted. His two lowest scores of the day came on his final two events: pommel horse and floor.

“On one side of me, one side was full of joy and confidence,” he said. “I was kind of proud I could make it, I could come to this point and do all the exercises all the way I really wanted to. The other part of me felt disappointment in a sense because I understand I could not do all the exercises perfectly. There was something I probably could have improved. So having these mixed feelings would better describe my emotions.”

Dalaloyan will have a day to rehab before team finals on Monday when the Russian gymnasts will attempt to win their first Olympic title since 2000.

ROC, China and Japan appear to continue their three-way tug-of-war for men’s supremacy. Japan triumphed in Rio in 2016. China edged the Russians at the 2018 world championships, with Russia returning the favor a year later.

Nagornyy grabbed the early lead in all-around qualifying, putting together a steady 87.897, just ahead of China’s Xiao Ruoteng and Sun Wei before getting passed by Hashimoto during the second subdivision.

“We respect our rivals very much,” Nagornyy said of the rivalry with China. “We made our best effort. We have a lot to do. There are still tasks ahead.”

Five-time Olympian Marian Dragulescu’s attempt to reach the vault finals at age 40 ended when he shorted his landing on his first vault. The three-time Olympic medalist finished his international career by completing the “Dragulescu vault” he invented with only a small hop on the landing.

Epke Zonderland of the Netherlands, the 2012 high bar champion, won’t reach the final on his signature event after an uncharacteristically sloppy series of connections put him in 10th place after the first subdivision. The 35-year-old arrived in Tokyo dealing with a shoulder injury.

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‘King Kohei’ Uchimura dethroned as 2-time Olympic champion misses gymnastics finals

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Kohei Uchimura’s gymnastics career is over. The Japanese star can take solace knowing that the sport the two-time Olympic champion redefined appears to be in good hands in his home country.

Daiki Hashimoto topped Olympic qualifying through two subdivisions on Saturday, putting on a show inside the largely empty Ariake Gymnastics Centre to help Japan sprint to the top of the leaderboard.

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The biggest surprise of the early session came from ROC gymnast Artur Dalaloyan. Competing on a surgically repaired Achilles tendon in his left leg, Dalaloyan earned an unlikely spot in the all-around final with a score of 85.597.

“I couldn’t control my emotions,” Dalaloyen said through an interpreter. “There’s something that broke inside me.”

Dalaloyan’s ranking as the second ROC gymnast behind reigning world champion Nikita Nagornyy means he’ll compete in the all-around final if his Achilles holds up.

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Dalaloyan didn’t decide to attempt to qualify for the all-around until meeting with his coaches on Friday.

“I felt strength and power to compete and decided to compete,” he said. “I keep working for 24 hours a day. For me, the Olympic Games is a really high priority. For most sportsmen and people who do [gymnastics], they don’t have the chance to be here. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Even if the injury prevented him from putting on the show he wanted. His two lowest scores of the day came on his final two events: pommel horse and floor.

ROC, China, Japan off to good starts

Dalaloyan will have a day to rehab before team finals on Monday when the ROC gymnasts will attempt to win their first Olympic title since 2000.

“We respect our rivals very much,” Nagornyy said of the rivalry with China. “We made our best effort. We have a lot to do. There are still tasks ahead.”

Five-time Olympian Marian Dragulescu’s attempt to reach the vault finals at age 40 ended when he shorted his landing on his first vault. The three-time Olympic medallist finished his international career by completing the “Dragulescu vault” he invented with only a small hop on the landing.

René Cournoyer of Repentigny, Quebec is currently in 33rd after recording a total of 77.697 points.

Great Britain is fourth through two subdivisions, followed by Switzerland, Ukraine, Brazil and Spain. The U.S., searching for its first podium finish since 2008 in Beijing, is set to go later Saturday.