Ban Russia’s athletes
PARIS — Ukrainian athletes who have died during Russia’s invasion have been killed like so many of their countrymen. At home. At work. On the front lines.
Some weren’t even fully formed athletes at all. Alina Peregudova, skinny, just 14 years old, was already an Olympic weightlifting prospect when she died in 2022 along with her mother in Russia’s bombardment of Mariupol.
Others had recorded their athletic prowess in a specifically Ukrainian context. Thirty-year-old track and field athlete Serhii Pronevych ran a marathon in 4 hours and 36 minutes — very slow by Olympic standards, except that he finished the 26.2 miles in 55 pounds of military gear. Captured and then executed while defending his town by Russian forces, his body bore signs of torture.
Spare a moment during this summer’s Paris Olympics to think of them, along with the hundreds of other dead Ukrainian athletes and tens of thousands more lost to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s blood-soaked aggression.
Then ask yourself why Russian athletes should be allowed to compete.
Better yet, pose the question to the International Olympic Committee, which decided to leave the decision to governing bodies of each of the 32 sports at the Paris Games.
Some, notably the track and field association, have banned participation at all international meets by athletes from Russia as well as from Belarus, the Kremlin’s puppet state. That means no pole vaulters, high jumpers or sprinters from those two countries will compete in Paris.
But some other federations will allow Russians and Belarusians, albeit under strictures laid down by the IOC. As so-called individual neutral athletes, they will participate under a flag and lyric-less anthem invented for the occasion, and with no teams, signs, colors or other symbols that identify their criminal country of origin.
That’s the rub, of course. It’s their country that has committed the crime of aggression in Ukraine, not the athletes who sweated and strove for a shot at Olympic glory. And so, goes the argument, enshrined in IOC doctrine, banning those athletes from competition would be collective punishment.
That’s true. But it’s also undeniable that to the Russian dictator, sports is simply another front in the propaganda offensive he wields in service to his imperial war in Ukraine.
That’s the point of Putin’s gambit to stage socalled Friendship Games, to be held in Moscow and Yekaterinburg in September. The idea is to show that Russia still has a few friends, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, whose participation would blunt Russia’s image as a pariah in Paris.
Soft power being a scarce Russian commodity, cash is the lure at these anti-Olympics. Unlike the actual Olympics, where athletes compete for medals, the Friendship Games will award some $50 million in prize money, with individual champions hauling in $40,000.
The Friendship Games, unbeholden to international prohibitions on performance-enhancing drugs, are also likely to be a showcase for state-sponsored doping, for years Moscow’s stock in trade at international sporting events. “The health of and fairness for athletes may be compromised,” the World Anti-Doping Agency said, in a gold-medal-worthy gem of understatement.
Moscow’s maneuvering is not lost on Olympics officials. Russian and Belarusian athletes who have expressed public support for the war are banned from the Paris Games. They include Abdulrashid Sadulaev, a freestyle wrestler and twotime Olympic champion who carried the Russian team’s flag at the Tokyo Games’ closing ceremony in 2021.
As for the few dozen Russian and Belarusian athletes who are allowed to compete in Paris — a far cry from the several hundred who took part in Tokyo — they will be barred from the opening ceremy, a 4-mile flotilla along the Seine.
Russia has denounced the IOC for slipping into “racism and neo-Nazism,” and provocateurs have placed calls to IOC officials, very likely another Kremlin ruse. Risibly, Moscow accuses the Games’ organizers of violating the Olympic ideal of insulating sports from the taint of politics.
Yet the moral case is clear for a ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes, who are witting or unwitting cogs in Putin’s machinery of disinformation, and therefore accomplices to his illegal war. That case has been argued eloquently by Sebastian Coe, a former Olympic champion runner, who as World Athletics president oversees international track and field competitions.
“Athletics will not be on the wrong side of history,” he said last year, speaking of Putin’s war. Given Russia’s assault in Ukraine and the destruction of hundreds of sports facilities there, he added, “I couldn’t in conscience offer a panoply of service and status to athletes from countries that were bringing that about.”
Coe has it right. As collective punishment, a ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes is no less moral than international economic sanctions. Nor would it be more effective at hastening the war’s end. But as an assertion of the world’s revulsion and Russia’s disrepute, a ban sticks the landing.
What a pity that other sports’ chiefs lack Coe’s spine and clarity.