As Australian sports chiefs applauded the confirmation of Russia's track and field ban in Rio, retired national sprint champion John Steffensen said the decision was right but warned it would not eradicate doping. Cycling Australia boss Nick Green, Victorian Institute of Sport head Anne Marie Harrison and Hockey Australia CEO Cam Vale backed the strong endorsement Australia's athletics federation expressed as soon as Russia's exclusion was made official this week. However none - including Steffensen - would go as far as advocating the International Olympic Committee should impose a blanket ban on all Russian athletes for the Games starting on   August 5. The IOC is set to announce its position on that vexed question after its executive board meets in Lausanne on Sunday. Australian Olympic Committee chief John Coates - also an IOC vice-president - has resisted commenting on the state of play until after that critical assembly.  
Only last month, however, Coates described Russia's anti-doping agency and its athletics federation as "rotten to the core". Silver medallist for Australia at the Athens Olympics in the 4x400m relay, dual 2006 Commonwealth Games gold medallist and bronze medallist in the 4x400m relay at the 2009 world titles, Steffensen told Fairfax Media on Friday: "It's a positive step in introducing more fear to those that cheat. The message is: it's not if you'll get caught, it's just when. But do I think it will stop the problem? No. Because when there's money and power involved in anything in life you always have corruption."It also does concern me that a decision like this will cost maybe two or three - or maybe 10 or 20 - clean Russian athletes who now won't be able to compete at the Games ..."Steffensen said the unearthing of systematic doping in Russian athletics has caused him to reflect on his personal experience running at the 2008 Olympics in particular. Australia's 4x400m relay team that included Steffensen finished sixth in the Beijing final. A Russian team placed third to take the bronze medal behind the Bahamas (silver) and the US (gold). "We were all surprised, me and a few other Jamaican friends, about where these guys had come from," Steffensen said on how he'd felt about the Russians' performance. "We hadn't seen them anywhere during the season and all of a sudden they had two or three guys running splits as fast as the top Americans in a relay."At that time I still had a lot of belief and naivety in the sport. I still believed it was clean. I thought they did a great performance and I moved on."This coming out [now] is not a huge revelation [to me] because it's starting to make sense of the puzzle." Green, a two-time Olympic gold medallist rower and Australia's chef de mission for the London Games, said of Russia's exclusion from track and field in Rio: "I can only support and endorse a global ban on stamping out doping and cheating in sport". But he stopped short at calling for the entire team to be removed from the Olympics. "I take a view that there are athletes there who are implicated who may be completely innocent," Green said. "The innocent athletes clearly have a right, in my view, to compete in a fair environment." VIS chief executive Harrison said: "I don't think any of us think it's exclusively the domain of the Russian [athletics] federation, but we've got to start somewhere."Like Green, she did not call for a blanket ban."It's a really tough one, that. Because on the one hand you say it has clearly been a systematic regime therefore it's probably across a number of sports where performance-enhancing processes could make a difference. But because I deal every day with every athlete as an individual, I of course see that not every athlete should be tarred with that same brush and I'd like to be able to find a way where you can identify those athletes [from Russia] that clearly don't have any advantage. But how you do that now in such a short period of time ... I don't know."