IOC’s rationale for Russia in Games rings hollow

“The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight,” says the Olympic creed. “The essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.”

That is all well and good when the fight is a 100-metre dash or a beach volleyball match. But when it is a ruthless and illegal life or death attack on a sovereign country — well, in that case the important thing is not about winning or losing and fighting well. It is solely about the triumph, and the essential thing is winning.

And any country that is perpetrating the attacks is so far outside the realm of international norms that it shouldn’t be allowed to participate in international gatherings and events.

That’s the message Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers in a polished and powerful video making its way around social media. It urges the International Olympic Committee to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from participating in the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The video tells of an 11-yearold aspiring gymnast who was killed in a missile attack, one of more than 230 Ukrainian athletes and coaches who have died in the war. It shows some of the 324 training facilities destroyed by Russian bombs.

And it points out that in the last summer Olympics, 45 of Russia’s 71 medals were won by members of its military. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the possibility of Ukrainian and Russian athletes standing together on a medal podium, particularly if one is a soldier in the same military that is laying waste to Ukraine.

None of this, it seems, will sway the IOC, who cling to its belief that the Olympics are apolitical, and the Games are about the athletes and fighting the good fight.

It is pushing a compromise similar to what was struck after the doping scandal involving Russia. Athletes could participate in those Games under the moniker Russian Olympic Committee, and the Russian flag and national anthem were banned.

A different flag should be enough to keep the IOC on the right side of history, according to the committee’s president, Thomas Bach.

“History will show who is doing more for peace,” he said. “The ones who try to keep lines open, to communicate, or the ones who want to isolate or divide.”

The IOC’s nudge-nudgewink-wink approach to Russia’s invasion may satisfy Bach, but it isn’t winning a lot of support outside the rarefied world that the IOC lives in.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, doesn’t think Russia should be allowed to participate in the Olympics “as long as there is this war, this Russian aggression on Ukraine.”

Canada joined 34 other countries in signing a declaration demanding that the IOC clearly define “neutrality” in its approach to allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to participate in Paris.

“Russian and Belarusian athletes must be banned from the 2024 Olympic Games,” Pascale St-Onge, Canada’s minister of sport, said.

What goes unmentioned in Bach’s defiance is that an Olympics without the Russians will be a diminished spectacle. And that will impact all of the billions and billions of dollars the IOC demands in television contracts.

Zelenskyy, on the other hand, is fighting the good fight, the kind of fight that the Olympic creed extols. He isn’t doing it to earn a medal. He’s in it to win, and that for him — and much of the rest of the world — is the “essential thing.”