DOHA, July 28, (Agencies): Qatar is taking just two women athletes to Rio, half the number which competed at London 2012, despite selecting its largest ever Olympics squad for Brazil, officials confirmed Thursday. Nada Arakji, the first ever Qatari woman to compete in the Olympics when she swam in the 50m freestyle four years ago, will this time compete in the 100m butterfl y.

Also heading to Rio is runner Dalal Al-Harthi who will race in the women's 400m. In total, Qatar is sending a team of 38 athletes, said officials although there was no official comment. The drop in female athletes comes despite Qatari Olympic selectors claiming earlier this year that they hoped the number of women competitors would increase.

This is the eighth Olympics at which Qatar has competed and there is expectation that the country can land its first ever gold medal. Possibly the biggest hope is high jumper Mutaz Barshim, who won bronze in London and earlier this year claimed his fourth Asian Indoor Athletics Championships at the age of just 24. Another gold medal prospect is the handball team, which took silver at the world championships last year, losing out to France in the final.

The team though has attracted criticism in the past for the number of non-Qatari born players in the side. Also going to Rio is Nasser al-Attiyah, a former world rally champion who won bronze at the men's skeet, a shooting event, in 2012. A riot during the Olympic torch relay cast a shadow over the Rio Games starting in just over a week Thursday, marking a new low in a ritual that had been meant to unite Brazil.

The torch is nearing the end of a 300- city relay that will end with the lighting of the Olympic fl ame in the Maracana stadium at the opening ceremony on August 5. But while organizers portray the epic journey as a chance to ignite public enthusiasm, repeated security incidents have turned the torch into a symbol of the organizational glitches and social discontent overshadowing South America's first Olympics. In Angra dos Reis, a coastal resort south of Rio, crowds angry over lack of public transport and nearly bankrupt Rio state's late payment of salaries fought with police at the torch parade late Wednesday.

Video broadcast on Globo television and social media showed riot police responding with rubber bullets and tear gas, while the crowd chanted 'put out the torch, put out the torch!' This came after repeated attempts in other cities to douse the torch with fire extinguishers or buckets of water. Highlight reels of other torch mishaps have gone viral online, including runners falling over, a police motorbike crashing into the parade, a man attempting to seize the torch, and political protests.

Russia's Olympic committee (ROC) has removed three cyclists from the team heading to the Rio Games while three more, who were potentially implicated in the McLaren report, are under investigation, the UCI announced on Thursday. The trio withdrawn by the ROC had previously been sanctioned for anti-doping violations, which meant they failed to meet the eligibility criteria put in place for Russian athletes by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). 'The UCI is in the process of identifying relevant rider samples and is in close dialogue with WADA to move forward with these cases immediately,' a UCI statement read.

'It has also passed the names of these three athletes to the IOC in the context of its Executive Board decision.' The UCI statement added: 'In addition, the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation (CADF) has carried out a careful assessment on the other 11 riders named by the ROC to participate in Rio 2016 cycling events.' United World Wrestling, the governing body for Olympic forms of wrestling, said on Thursday a special commission it set up had recommended that 16 of the 17 Russian wrestlers who qualified for the Rio Olympics should be allowed to take part.

It said in a statement the 16 had been tested in accredited laboratories outside Russia, and were not mentioned in a report that alleged Russia ran a state-sponsored doping programme. It said one competitor, Viktor Lebedev, should not take part in the Rio Games because he had a positive doping test in 2006. A depleted Russian team departed for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday, missing dozens of athletes who were excluded amid the country's doping scandal. Team members left on a charter fl ight from Moscow's Sheremetevo airport to Brazil, a day after an emotional farewell ceremony with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

More than 100 athletes from what was originally a 387-strong team have been barred from competing in Rio by international sports federations under sanctions which most Russian athletes consider unfair. 'We're after medals, that's it,' handball player Anna Sen said as she prepared to board the fl ight. 'We need to fight for those athletes who were disqualified.' Volleyball player Sergei Tetyukhin, a four-time Olympic medalist, will be Russia's fl agbearer for the opening ceremony in Rio, according to pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva. Isinbayeva, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, has become a de facto spokeswoman for Russian athletes excluded from the Olympics and gave a tearful address to the team in the Kremlin on Wednesday. 'Today, as never before, we need to stay united and become a family,' the 40-year-old Tetyukhin said, ignoring what he called 'provocations addressed at our team and our mighty country.'

No track and field athletes were among the contingent heading for Rio, since the entire track team is banned from competing, except for a single US-based long jumper, following revelations of widespread doping. The track team did, however, attend the ceremonial farewell with Putin on Wednesday, when the Russian president branded restrictions on Russia as 'pure discrimination.'