IOC Board Member Regrets Holocaust Comparison

(ATR) Gian-Franco Kasper was forced to issue an apology on Thursday after comparing calls to exclude Russia from the PyeongChang Olympics with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

"I'm just against bans or sanctioning of innocent people," the president of the International Skiing Federation told reporters on the sidelines of the IOC executive board meeting in Pyeongchang, according to AAP.

"Like Mr. Hitler did - all Jews were to be killed, independently of what they did or did not."

His remarks were followed by a statement issued by the IOC’s press office and tweeted on the IOC’s Twitter page.

"It was an inappropriate and insensitive comment," the 73-year-old IOC official said.

"I apologise unreservedly for any offence I have caused. I am truly sorry."

WADA investigator Richard McLaren’s second explosive report on state-sponsored doping in December revealed that more than 1,000 Russian athletes were involved in or benefited from "a cover-up on an unprecedented scale".

Disciplinary proceedings were brought against 28 Russian athletes in December following Sochi 2014 doping retests found evidence of cheating. More cases will follow re-analysis of samples from all the country’s athletes who participated at the Games and the London 2012 Olympics.

IOC's Russia Doping Investigations

Two IOC commissions are currently reviewing the evidence presented in McLaren’s two dossiers to determine the scale of the institutional doping cover-up and the involvement of Russian athletes.

Swiss IOC member DenisOswald is chairing the commission analyzing allegations of doping manipulation at the Sochi 2014 Games.

"We are still investigating. We are in contact with the McLaren group and trying to collect as much information as we can," Oswald told Around the Rings at the WADA symposium in Lausanne this week.

"We cannot start without having some more evidence... but we should get from the report or from the McLaren team."

Oswald, who had originally hoped to send an interim report to this week's IOC board meeting, now says his first report to president Thomas Bach's top team will come in the summer.

"I doesn't mean we will have finished everything. But certainly we will have an idea of progress to make a report," Oswald said.

The Oswald--run investigation is taking longer than expected due to the need to holdhearings for athletes as part of the disciplinary procedure, while there are thousands off pages of additional documentation from McLaren to review.

"We'll try to proceed as quickly as we can... but safely, and hopefully we will come to some conclusions long enough before PyeongChang in order to avoid the situation we had in Rio, having a report just a few weeks before."

Last summer, on the eve of the Rio Olympics, the IOC controversially decided against a blanket ban on Russia.

The IOC’s ruling body is not expected to be equipped with enough information from the two commissions to decide whether Russia can participate at the PyeongChang Games until the end of the year. Possible IOC sanctions include a blanket ban on Russia from PyeongChang 2018, disqualification of certain athletes and the exclusion of implicated officials, entourage or government executives from the Games.

Reported by Mark Bisson

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