How is the changing global political situation reflected in the world of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)? In a glass of fizzybrew from the American sponsor, with lemon, without ice. Shamil Tarpishchev was very relaxed on Tuesday in Milan. It is much more relaxed here than in Paris (at the 2024 Summer Games; editor), said the man who was once known as “Yeltsin’s tennis teacher”.
Shamil Tarpishchev is an outstanding example of the long-lasting career of Russian sports officials. Once, when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union, he was a tennis player himself for CSKA, the Red Army club. In the 1990s, he not only gave the country’s number one, Yeltsin, tips for forehands and backhands, but as head of the National Sports Fund, he benefited from the extremely lucrative duty-free vodka and cigarette imports made possible by the Kremlin.
Shamil Tarpishchev next to Gianni Infantino
After the leading Moscow mafia figure Otari Kwantrischwili was shot following a sauna session, Tarpishchev was among the mourners. That was in the spring of 1994, and in the fall of the same year he was accepted into the IOC. In the state of Vladimir Putin, who awarded him the Order for Services to the Fatherland on July 1, 2022, he is still President of the Russian Tennis Association.
When the 145th session was opened on Monday evening at La Scala in Milan by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Shamil Tarpishchev, now 78 years old, sat next to Gianni Infantino, President of the International Football Association (FIFA).
It couldn’t have been better. “He was very positive about our efforts in terms of participation (in the World Cup in the summer/ed.),” said Tarpishchev the day after, cola in hand. Would he have to push the FIFA boss? “No, we communicate all the time.” This is how it has to be in order to achieve the goal: the return of Russians to sport on a broad front, while Kiev continues to be bombed, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine rages and the sports structures in three Ukrainian provinces remain annexed by Russian sport.
Kirsty Coventry: “The core of our mission is sport”
There is no indication that the violation of the law in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk or Luhansk will soon be healed, that sport will be organized again by the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine. But it’s not just Gianni Infantino who sends messages to Moscow from Milan.
Kirsty Coventry sounded only a little more cryptic on Tuesday morning in her first speech as IOC president at the start of a general assembly: “The core of our mission is sport. I have heard the same message from so many of you: Let’s focus on our core. We are a sports organization. We understand politics and we know that we do not act in a vacuum. And our game is sport. That means sport must remain neutral. A place where every athlete can participate freely without being influenced by their government’s policies In an increasingly divided world, this principle is more important than ever.”
Who is being prevented? The Russian government’s policy continues to primarily prevent Ukrainian athletes from freely participating in the Olympic Games, for example because they are dead because they were victims of Putin’s war of aggression.
Almost four years after it was unleashed immediately after the Winter Games in Beijing 2022, which were sold as a peace festival, see the cola drinker Tarpishchev, see Gianni Infantino, who sees the exclusion of the Russians as a reason for “more hatred”, and see Kirsty Coventry at her programmatic appearance in Milan, active resocialization of the Russians is being carried out in the Olympic world.
Reason: This is the only way the games could inspire
There is nothing to suggest that this does not mean the active rehabilitation of a state sports system in which the army of the belligerent state plays the decisive role; whose president allows the civilian population to be killed, bombed out and frozen in his war against Ukraine. According to recent calculations by the Center for International and Strategic Studies, 1.2 million Russian soldiers and 500,000 to 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers became victims of the war.
Kirsty Coventry’s justification for the participation of all athletes in the Olympic Games, regardless of which tyranny they come from, is: This is the only way the Olympic Games can continue to inspire.
On Tuesday, she said the IOC must find the “right balance” between tradition and innovation. Sports, disciplines and events must be examined with a “fresh eye” in order to keep up with the times: “Further developments will affect all of us: athletes, associations, national Olympic committees, organizers, fans and others.” To give an example from the winter world, there are already considerable doubts as to whether Nordic combined has a future in the Winter Games program.
The IOC President said she would listen to every voice. Decisions would then be made that “serve the long-term interests of the games.” Kirsty Coventry announced that these would probably be uncomfortable discussions. Some presidents of international sports associations certainly feel insecure. And some officials of a sport that is only more widely recognized in the Olympic context are already out looking for allies.
From this perspective, too, some paths could soon lead to Moscow again. Scruples about a murderous war of aggression would only be a hindrance. The cola was still bubbling in the glass when Shamil Tarpishchev announced that he would speak in the plenary session in Milan on Wednesday.
