Vilnius, Lithuania
Reuters
A group of 35 countries, including the United States, Germany and Australia, will demand that Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from the 2024 Olympics, the Lithuanian sports minister said on Friday, deepening the uncertainty over the Paris Games.
The move cranks up the pressure on an International Olympic Committee that is desperate to avoid the sporting event being torn asunder by the bloody conflict unfolding in Ukraine.
“We are going in the direction that we would not need a boycott because all countries are unanimous,” Jurgita Siugzdiniene said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy attends an online meeting with sport ministers of 35 countries to discuss a ban of Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Olympics, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 10th February, 2023. PICTURE: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy took part in the online meeting attended by 35 ministers to discuss the call for the ban, pointing out 228 Ukrainian athletes and coaches died as a result of the Russian aggression.
“If there’s an Olympics sport with killings and missile strikes, you know which national team would take the first place,” he told the ministers.
“NOT SO ROSY”: RUSSIAN ATHLETES FACE PROSPECT OF OLYMPICS BAN
Russian athletics stars are no strangers to being barred from international competitions, and the prospect of missing next year’s Olympics over the invasion of Ukraine has piled onto years of frustration felt towards global sports bodies.
Since the International Olympic Committee opened the door for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals at the 2024 Paris Games, calls to have them excluded have snowballed.
Olympic Rings are pictured in front of The Olympic House, headquarters of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland on 8th September, 2022. PICTURE: Laurent Gillieron
At an indoor track in north-eastern Moscow on Friday, hurdler Sergey Shubenkov said he was avoiding reading the news about Russia’s Olympic prospects.
“As an athlete, I devoted all of my life to this sport and always did my job,” said Shubenkov, the 2015 world champion in the 110m hurdles and a two-time Olympian. “And I’m being told now, ‘You’re a good guy but we don’t need you’.”
A group of 35 countries, including the United States, Germany and Australia, will demand that Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from the 2024 Olympics, the Lithuanian sports minister said on Friday, stepping up pressure on the IOC.
Ukraine and some of its allies have already threatened to boycott the Paris Games if Russian and Belarusian athletes compete, while the IOC has left it to international federations to decide whether athletes from Russia and Belarus should be given a pathway to qualify.
“Much will depend on how World Athletics will behave,” Shubenkov said. “And there, of course, everything is not so rosy.”
Shubenkov was one of 10 Russians selected by World Athletics, the sport’s international governing body, to compete at the Tokyo Games without Russia’s flag or anthem.
The measure was taken as part of wider sanctions against the Russian athletics federation, which has been suspended since 2015 over doping offences.
When asked about the prospect of not being able to defend her Olympic title, high jumper Maria Lasitskene said: “It’s tough psychologically so I try to keep it together, train, compete and jump.”
Former sprinter Irina Privalova, a four-time Olympic medallist who now serves as deputy head of Russia’s athletics federation, dismissed the suggestion that dissidents among Russian athletes could be allowed to compete as refugees.
“Athletes and any Russian citizen who does not support the President’s [Vladimir Putin’s] decision should not represent the country,” she told Reuters.
“I think those who don’t support [Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine] have already left. The ones who remain are those who support it.”
– MOSCOW BUREAU, Moscow, Russia/Reuters
“Terror and Olympism are two opposites, they cannot be combined.”
British sports minister Lucy Frazer said on Twitter that the meeting was very productive.
“I made the UK’s position very clear: As long as Putin continues his barbaric war, Russia and Belarus must not be represented at the Olympics,” she wrote.
Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State who leads the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, also participated in the meeting.
“The Assistant Secretary outlined that the United States will continue to join a vast community of nations in our unwavering support for the people of Ukraine and hold the Russian Federation accountable for its brutal and barbaric war against Ukraine, as well as the complicit Lukashenka regime in Belarus,” a US Department of State spokesperson said.
“We will continue to consult with our independent National Olympic Committee – the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee – on next steps, and look forward to greater clarity by the IOC on their proposed policy toward Russia and Belarus.”
With war raging in Ukraine, the Baltic States, Nordic countries and Poland had called on international sports bodies to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing in the Olympics.
“We know that 70 per cent of Russian athletes are soldiers. I consider it unacceptable that such people participate in the Olympic Games in the current situation, when fair play obviously means nothing to them,” Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavsky said after meeting the heads of the Czech IOC and the national sports agency.
Boycott
Ukraine has threatened to boycott the games if Russian and Belarusian athletes compete and Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk has said Russians will win “medals of blood, deaths and tears” if allowed to take part.
Such threats have revived memories of boycotts in the 1970s and 1980s during the Cold War era that still haunt the global Olympic body today, and it has called on Ukraine to drop them.
However, Polish Sports Minister Kamil Bortniczuk said that a boycott was not on the table for now.
“It’s not time to talk about a boycott yet,” he told a news conference, saying there were other ways of putting pressure on the IOC that could be explored first.
He said that most participants had been in favour of an absolute exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes.
“Most voices – with the exception of Greece, France, Japan – were exactly in this tone,” he said.
He said that creating a team of refugees that would include Russian and Belarusian dissidents could be a compromise solution.
Neutrals
The IOC has opened the door for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals.
It has said a boycott will violate the Olympic Charter and that its inclusion of Russians and Belarusians is based on a UN resolution against discrimination within the Olympic movement.
We rely on our readers to fund Sight's work - become a financial supporter today!
For more information, head to our Subscriber's page.
Anette Trettebergstuen, Norway’s Minister of Culture and Equality, also said it was “far too early” to think about a boycott but added that it was “strange and provocative” for the IOC to consider allowing Russian athletes to compete.
“In a Russian context, there is no difference between sport and politics, and any sports performance is pure propaganda,” Trettebergstuen told Norwegian newspaper VG.
“Saying the athletes should be able to compete as neutrals…Neutrality is not possible. It’s a dead end.”
Some 18 months before the competition is due to start, the IOC is desperate to calm the waters so as not to jeopardize the Games’ message of global peace and deliver a huge hit to income.
While Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of host city Paris, said Russian athletes should not take part, Paris 2024 organisers, who last week said they would abide by the IOC’s decision on who would take part in the Games, declined to comment.
The Russian sports ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment. An IOC spokesperson said they would not comment “on interpretations from individual participants of a meeting whose overall content is unknown”.
– Additional reporting by ANNA WLODARCZAK-SEMCZUK, KUBA STEZYCKI and PAWEL FLORKIEWICZ in Warsaw, Poland, M MUVIJA in London, UK, STEVE KEATING in Phoenix, US, SIMON JENNINGS in Bengaluru, India, JAN LOPATKA in Prague, Czech Republic, ALEKSANDAR VASOVIC in Belgrade, Serbia, JULIEN PRETOT in Paris, France, and KAROLOS GROHMANN
