“The timing there was not in our hands,” Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Studies had to be done, evidence had to be provided, fair hearings for the Russian athletes had to be offered.”

After completing its own prolonged investigations that reiterated what had been known for more than a year, the I.O.C. in December barred Russia’s Olympic committee from the Games and prohibited all insignia linked to the country. Yet in an effort to avoid punishing athletes who did not cheat, the I.O.C. later cleared more than 160 athletes it determined to be clean to participate as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”

Russia continues to deny the existence of a state-sponsored doping program.

The situation unfolding this week in South Korea is reminiscent of two years ago, when Russia also tried to use the court to restore athletes barred from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

In Rio, the I.O.C.’s leadership blamed the World Anti-Doping Agency for causing chaos by releasing the results of its investigation into Russia’s systematic doping plan so close to the start of the Games. In Pyeongchang on Wednesday, Bach blamed the Court of Arbitration for Sport for causing confusion and uncertainty last week when it upheld an appeal by 28 Russian athletes who had been barred, judging that the evidence against them was “insufficient to establish that an antidoping rule violation was committed by the athletes concerned.”