Panarin caught at intersection of sports and politics

The list of players absent from the New York Rangers lineup at present looks something like this:

Jacob Trouba (thumb) Filip Chytil (hand) Artemi Panarin (political persecution)

Panarin, the 29-year-old winger, is the leading scorer for the Rangers, one of very few players on the team who was having a good season. He has also been on a leave of absence since Monday, when a Russian newspaper reported allegations from a former coach that Panarin had assaulted a teenage girl in 2011.

Andrei Nazarov, who had coached Panarin on Vityaz in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League, said the physical assault had taken place in Latvia in 2011, that local police had been paid off to cover it up, and that the incident was an open secret in Latvian hockey circles.

Panarin took a leave from the team immediately and the Rangers have said the story was unfounded and “clearly an intimidation tactic” being used against the player because he has been “outspoken on recent political events.” Last month, Panarin posted support on social media for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and he has been critical of President Vladimir Putin in the past.

While the intersection of sports and politics in the West is usually limited to athletes speaking out against racial inequality and social injustice, the Panarin episode is a reminder that in some countries, “stick to sports” can carry a heavier meaning.

Those who run afoul of the mantra can face real consequences. Few countries in the world intertwine sports and nationalism as overtly as Russia.

The allegations against Panarin are depressingly plausible. Young athletes certainly do get involved in altercations in bars at times, and they also can be protected by local authorities who don’t want to get the star in trouble. A decade ago Panarin was the rare young talent who had stayed home to play in the KHL rather than follow the well-trod route to the National Hockey

League that many Russians take through the Canadian junior ranks. It’s not hard to imagine a coverup in the manner that Nazarov has described.

But the days since the initial report have produced no corroborating evidence, whether from the authorities in Riga or Panarin’s former teammates. The KHL has said it never received a complaint about an incident involving Panarin in 2011 and didn’t investigate then or at any time since. Of course, had bribes been paid back then, those involved would be unlikely to admit to it now. Nazarov’s allegation, even if totally fabricated, will be impossible for Panarin to comprehensively disprove. If Nazarov wanted to curry favour with Russian authorities by publicly sabotaging Panarin, then the job is done.

If it sounds odd that someone would set out to ruin a hockey player because he supported a political opposition leader, then it is worth noting the context of sports in today’s Russia. This is the same country that engineered a massive doping scheme that resulted in the overturning of several Olympic results, as well as an official ban of Russian involvement in that competition, even if athletes themselves have been allowed to compete under a neutral banner. That story is so bonkers that it bears repeating. After a disappointing performance at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Putin is said to have ordered a program to ensure that the Russian team would be around the top of the medal table when the Olympics were at home in Sochi in 2014. The country was spending tens of billions of dollars to turn a seaside resort town into an unlikely venue for a Winter Games, and it wouldn’t do if Russia didn’t also have a dominant team. The country then embarked on a program that was complex in execution but also boldly simple: what if the entire Russian anti-doping apparatus was in fact a doping apparatus?

Putin installed a longtime ally from St. Petersburg, Vitaly Mutko, as the Minister of Sport, and systems were developed to both help promising athletes beat drug tests and to erase evidence of tests that they had failed. It worked exactly as designed, and Russia did top the medal table in Sochi, thanks in part to a scheme in which agents of the country’s security forces worked undercover in the Olympic drug lab to swap dirty urine samples with those that were drugfree. One of the key whistleblowers in the whole affair, the Russian scientist who engineered the doping program, remains in hiding in the United States. Mutko became the Deputy Prime Minister for a time, though he is now retired from politics. The attitude among Russians, even those high-profile ones who compete in the West, has been to ignore the scandal or complain that their country was unfairly targeted.

The much more common attitude among Russian athletes is like that of Alex Ovechkin, the Washington Capitals star who is friends with Putin. He has avoided offering an opinion on various Russian controversies, from incursions on Crimea to interference in American elections, choosing instead to say nothing that would offend audiences in either of his homes. (He did announce a “social movement” called Putinteam in 2017, with various Russian athletes on board, although it does not appear to have done much of anything since.)

Panarin, meanwhile, remains at his home in Connecticut. The Rangers, heading into Friday’s games, are tied for last in the NHL’S East Division and could desperately use some scoring help to avoid falling out of a possible playoff race. There is, the team has said, no timetable for Panarin’s return.