She’s been one of the most dominant athletes in the world for years but Mariya Lasitskene has still never even competed at the Olympics.
Lasitskene, the world’s best female high jumper, had been hitting those heights since she was a junior and to make it clear there was a giant asterisk next to Beitia’s win she comfortably cleared 2.03m in her first competition after being one of dozens of Russian athletes banned from competing in Brazil.
Instead of having the Russian anthem played as she stood atop the podium in London in 2017 and Doha this year, Lasitskene listened to the official tune of the international athletics federation because she was forced to compete as a neutral. Shlyakhtin had taken office shortly after the federation was suspended from international competition for widespread doping in 2015 — and was supposed to be cleaning up the sport.
“The Russian flag was taken from me at the end of 2015,” she wrote, calling herself “an athlete who has a lot of questions”.
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