Antyukh and Silnov a Russian Olympic Champions Banned for Doping

Antyukh and Silnov were both charged last year with anti-doping violations stemming from the report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency that alleged a system of state-sponsored doping had existed in Russia.

Silnov, 36, won the high jump title at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Antyukh, 39, was the gold medallist in the women's 400 metre hurdles at the 2012 London Games. She also won bronze in the 400m and a silver medal in the 4x400m relay in Athens in 2004.

Both athletes will retain those medals because the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled on Wednesday that only their results from 2013 onwards will be annulled.

Russian Olympic champions Natalya Antyukh and Andrey Silnov have each been banned for four years for doping after being named in the 2016 McLaren report.

Silnov has not competed since 2016 but was vice-president of the Russian athletics federation until 2019 when he stood down.

Sport's top court also punished two other Russian athletes named in the McLaren report, middle distance runner Yelena Soboleva and hammer thrower Oksana Kondratyeva.

Soboleva was banned for eight years and had all her results from 2011 to 2016 annulled, CAS said without giving its reasons for the decision. She has already been stripped of her 1500m silver medal from the 2007 world championships.

Kondratyeva, who never won a major medal, was banned for four years.

CAS also cut the length of bans for four Russians, including high jumper Ivan Ukhov whose ban was reduced from four years to two years, nine months.

The decision has no bearing on an earlier ruling to strip Ukhov of the 2012 Olympic high jump title for doping.

And Other News , Nearly two dozen Greek gymnasts have alleged in a letter they suffered decades of abuse and neglect "bordering on torture" at the hands of their coaches.

The letter published on Wednesday was sent this week to Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis by 22 female and male athletes, Greek daily EfSyn revealed.

It alleged "harsh and abusive" practices dating back to 1985 included forced fasting, psychological and physical punishment and sexual harassment.

"For the first time, a cry of protest by a large number of gymnastics athletes about psychological and physical abuse is expressed en masse," the athletes' lawyer Alexandros Adamidis told the newspaper.

There was no immediate response to the allegations from the gymnastics federation, which in March elected a new chairman for the first time in 14 years.

The letter said coaches would slap, kick, shove and throw objects at athletes during training, even dragging some girls by the hair.

On occasion, coaches would remove protective mats, causing injuries. Some of the athletes were forced to train while injured, the letter said.

Disciplinary measures allegedly included forcing athletes to train in extreme temperatures and denying them toilet breaks.

Because of strict weight requirements, some athletes starved themselves to the point of fainting, and resorted to secretly eating toothpaste and food leftovers scavenged from hotel bins, it said.

Prominent Greek gymnasts have previously accused the federation of failing to ensure proper training facilities. After the Greece's main gymnastics indoor hall at Agios Kosmas, Athens flooded last June, Olympic champion Lefteris Petrounias said the country's squad was forced to train at a disadvantage to other nations.

"Every time it rains we are forced to stop training. Our equipment is frequently destroyed," Petrounias said on Facebook, before emergency repairs were ordered. Earlier this week, after an asymmetric bars frame collapsed during training at the Agios Kosmas facility, Petrounias' coach Dimitris Raftis told Kathimerini daily that no federation official had inspected the hall's gymnastics equipment in years.

"We have been saying this for years ... but they did not take us seriously because they know how much we love (the sport)," Raftis told the daily.

He also noted that rodent droppings had been found in the gymnastics foam pit, calling the previous management "medieval."

Petrounias won gold on the rings in Rio in 2016 and Greece also won artistic gymnastics medals in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

Greece in recent months has been rocked by a wave of allegations of sexual abuse in the fields of arts, sport and education.

More than three years after the #MeToo movement surfaced in the United States, the code of silence in Greece was broken in December by a two-time Olympic sailing medallist, Sofia Bekatorou.

Bekatorou said that when she was 21 she was subjected to "sexual harassment and abuse" by a senior federation member in his hotel room, shortly after trials for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The man she accused, who was asked to resign his position in the Greek sailing federation, has denied any wrongdoing.

Another prominent case involves Dimitris Lignadis, the former artistic director of Greece's national theatre, who has been accused of raping minors.

Lignadis, who was placed in pre-trial detention in February, denies the charges.