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For the 2024 Paris Olympics, which will be held from July 26 to August 11, the International Olympic Committee has imposed several restrictions on the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, they will not be able to participate in team sports, but only in individual sports and as “neutral athletes”, that is, without the flag, without their country’s uniforms, without national anthems. They will also be excluded from the opening ceremony and will have to demonstrate their “political impartiality”, that is, not to support the war started by Russia (and supported by Belarus). Finally, they cannot belong to military corps.
It will be the second consecutive Summer Olympics (the fourth, also considering the 2018 and 2022 winter Olympics) in which Russia will not be present as a country: in fact, it was excluded from the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2021 due to the huge scandal linked to state doping. In those Olympics, Russian male and female athletes participated as Roc (the acronym comes from the English Russian Olympic Committee), but without the flag of Russia. Last October, however, the International Olympic Committee suspended the Russian Olympic Committee for having annexed the sports organizations of the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia, and for this reason the Russian athletes will not even be reunited under the ROC in Paris.
There will also be many fewer: the IOC expects a maximum of 58 Russian athletes and 28 Belarusian athletes, also because all the impositions from outside have created a certain hostility in Russia towards the Olympics and towards the athletes who want to go there. In Tokyo, where they also participated in team sports, there were 335 Russian athletes and 101 Belarusian athletes, who won 71 and 7 medals respectively. One of the main reasons is that in Paris there will also be no Russian and Belarusian athletes in several individual sports, because the international federations of some sports have decided to prohibit their participation. Among these is World Athletics, whose president Sebastian Coe recently said it was “simply inconceivable” to invite a nation that “shows such contempt for the integrity of sport and the well-being of Ukrainian athletes.”
– Read also: Ukraine has asked its athletes to “stay away” from Russians at the Paris Olympics
However, it is not just the restrictions imposed by the IOC and the federations that reduce the chances for Russian athletes to go to the Paris Games. The Russian government itself is becoming increasingly hostile towards those who want to participate in the Olympics, and since several sports survive thanks to state funding, it is complicated to take positions against Putin’s regime. Formally, the government and the Russian Olympic Committee have not put explicit vetoes against participation in the Olympics, saying that male and female athletes can decide individually whether to do so: in practice, however, there is a lot of pressure and taking sides for the Olympics is very complicated, because it means going against the regime.
There are therefore few athletes who can openly show themselves happy and proud to go to Paris: those who live abroad and do not depend in any way on the state do so, such as the Russian tennis players Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev, or the Belarusian tennis player Aryna Sabalenka.
Even for them, however, it is not easy to publicly distance themselves from the regimes of their countries and from what they are doing. Rublev was the only one among high-level Russian athletes to have exposed himself immediately against the war. At the beginning of April, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee Stanislav Pozdnyakov defined the group of Russian tennis players who want to participate in the Olympics as “a team of foreign agents”. In Russia, the term “foreign agent” is associated with a law that punishes people or organizations that the regime says receive funds from abroad to carry out anti-government activities. It is usually used to repress dissent and the fact that it is used to talk about tennis players has a strong symbolic and political value, even if it does not actually entail consequences for them.
Belarusian tennis player Aryna Sabalenka, 26 years old (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
As the French newspaper wrote last month The worldin Russia there are essentially two factions: those who think that the Olympics are too important in an athlete’s career to give them up, and those who, like Pozdnyakov, do not share the organizers’ decision and believe it is better not to have representatives in Paris, rather than do so under the conditions decided by the International Olympic Committee.
Among those who would like to go, The world he mentioned for example the swimmer Julija Efimova, who in her career has won six gold medals at the World Championships but has never won gold at the Olympics, and at 32 years old she thinks that Paris is her last chance to do so. The Russian Sports Minister, Oleg Matytsin, himself said he was against the boycott. Even among those in favor of participation, however, there are more harsh positions. According to the president of the Russian wrestling sports federation, athletes should try in every way to qualify for the Olympics: however, he spoke about it in terms of revenge, saying “the enemy will be defeated and the victory will be ours”.
However, there is a good part of athletes, managers and Russian public opinion who think it is right to boycott the Olympics. The president of the Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation Irina Viner, believed to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin (until 2022 she was married to the oligarch Ališer Usmanov), said that the Russian athletes in Paris will form «a team of expatriates» and will be « totally dehumanized, people will not forgive them.” The gymnasts will therefore not participate in the Olympics, a decision shared by other Russian national federations such as athletics, but also judo, rowing or fencing, which refused to participate in the qualifiers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of the Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation Irina Viner (Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA-Novosti, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)
Many athletes, however, will not participate with conviction, because they quite explicitly support the Russian regime. Russian swimmers Evgeny Rylov (gold medalist in Tokyo in the 100 and 200 meter backstroke) and Kliment Kolesnikov already said in December that they would not accept the IOC conditions. Rylov had already been suspended in 2022 for having been photographed wearing clothes with the letter Z drawn on them, a symbol of support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for having participated in various rallies in favor of the war and Putin. In any case, the fact that the government and the Russian Olympic Committee have not imposed official rules on participation still makes it uncertain how many and which Russian and Belarusian athletes will be at the Olympics this summer.
2024-05-09 15:08:40
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