Six skaters on Russia’s Sochi Olympic women’s hockey team -- including its captain and leading points scorer -- were banned from the Olympics for life by the IOC.
The Russian team that lost in the Sochi Olympic quarterfinals was also retroactively disqualified as a whole.
The IOC announced the decision Tuesday as part of its ongoing sanctions against Russian athletes committing doping violations at the Sochi Winter Games.
Captain and leading points scorer Yekaterina Smolentseva, a four-time Olympian, was among the six players banned.
The others were Inna Dyubanok, Yekaterina Lebedeva, Yekaterina Pashkevich, Anna Shibanova and Galina Skiba.
That makes 31 Russian athletes retroactively disqualified from the Sochi Olympics (not including the rest of the hockey players part of the disqualified team who haven’t been implicated in doping).
Russia is now the first nation to have 100 athletes disqualified from the Olympics all-time, according to Olympic historians.
The Russian women’s hockey team is the first team in any sport from any nation to be disqualified from an Olympics since 1948, according to Olympic historians.
The full IOC press release is here.
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