The team made the announcement in a statement Saturday. It is the latest sign of discontent among athletes over the handling of the Russian doping scandal, which corrupted the 2014 Winter Olympics as well as scores of other events across several years.

Russian officials were not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for the International Biathlon Union declined to comment.

The International Olympic Committee’s executive board is meeting Saturday to determine whether to lift the suspension on Russia’s National Olympic Committee and allow its athletes to march with the Russian flag during Sunday’s closing ceremony for the Pyeongchang Games.

Doping by Russian athletes infested biathlon for years. The revelations in 2016 unmasked the larger state-led doping program. Yet the IBU has resisted calls to move events from the country, saying those decisions were made before the World Anti-Doping Agency declared Russia’s anti-doping noncompliant.

“The IBU’s recent decision to move forward with the World Cup Final in Tyumen, Russia, is completely unacceptable,” the U.S. athletes said in a statement.

Their decision follows a similar stand made by the Canadian team. Czech officials, cited by the French news agency Agence France-Presse, said their athletes would also boycott the event. Sweden’s Sebastian Samuelsson said his team was also poised to boycott events in Russia. Samuelsson won a silver medal in Pyeongchang last week.

“The outcry from our fellow athletes from around the world has been respectful, strong and definitive. In addition to the dozens who expressed their opinion to the IBU Athletes Committee members ahead of the meeting in January 2018, the IBU received letters representing over 30 athletes, from eight countries, and included three 2018 Olympic Champions,” the U.S. statement said.

The IOC itself has directed winter sports organizations like the IBU to halt their preparations for competitions in Russia and seek alternative venues. For sports officials who have defied that guidance, the threat of boycott by global athletes has prompted them to move major events, including skiing, bobsled and skeleton competitions.

The World Anti-Doping Agency has declared Russia’s drug testing authority noncompliant, a status it says it will maintain until Russia publicly accepts that there was a state-backed doping program and allows WADA officials full access to data from the main testing laboratory in Moscow.

Russian biathletes were among scores of athletes barred from competing at the 2018 games after an investigation into the doping conspiracy, which involved the state security apparatus clandestinely switching tainted urine samples for clean ones.

Former IOC President Jacques Rogge in 2011 was so concerned about the country’s biathlon federation that he urged Russia’s president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev, to take stronger action. Grigory Rodchenkov the former head of Russia’s doping laboratory, who became a whistleblower, said in a sworn statement that billionaire Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov played a role in obscuring the scheme when he led the Russian Biathlon Union. Prokhorov, who denies the claim, is helping to finance a New York defamation lawsuit against Rodchenkov by three banned biathletes.

Several Russian athletes who won medals in Sochi were stripped of their awards after investigations tying them to the doping program. That has led to threats to competitors from other countries in line to receive the reallocated medals, including the Czech biathlon team, which was told in November it would receive a silver originally won by Russia.

Russia’s doping problems have overshadowed the participation of more than 160 of its athletes in South Korea. They have participated under the IOC’s flag and worn neutral uniforms, a condition of their entry into the games.

Two of the four athletes to fail drug tests here have been Russian, with the most recent failure coming Friday, on the eve of the critical IOC meeting that will rule on the status of its banned Olympic Committee and what happens at the closing ceremony.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

TARIQ PANJA © 2018 The New York Times