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Cape Town - The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has confirmed in a statement that all seven Russian tennis players have been given the green light to compete at the Rio Olympics which gets underway on August 5.
"The ITF welcomes the decision of the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to permit clean athletes to compete in Rio 2016 and to let each International Federation determine the eligibility of its respective Russian athletes.
"The seven Russian tennis players who have been nominated to compete in Rio have been subject to rigorous anti-doping testing programme outside Russia, which included a total of 205 samples collected since 2014," said the ITF statement.
"The ITF believes that this is sufficient for the seven Russian tennis players to meet the relevant requirement of today's decision of the IOC Executive Board.
"The ITF will also be seeking confirmation from WADA that none of those players, or the Russian Tennis Federation, were implicated in the McLaren report, in accordance with the IOC decision."
The Russian Olympic tennis team has added more players, with Teymuraz Gabashvili to join Andrey Kuznetsov and Evgeny Donskoy.
The female tennis player’s representing Russia are: Svetlana Kuznetsova, Anastasia Pavlyuchenko, Darya Kasatkina, Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina.
On Sunday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) lifted the blanket ban on Russia from competing in Rio opening the door for decisions to be made by the individual sporting federations.
A total ban on all Russian athletes was called for after it was revealed that the country had been running a state-sponsored doping programme.
