As Paris prepares to welcome athletes from around the world for the Olympic Games (OG) synonymous with harmony, Russia, which has always been a key player in the Olympic Games, is being kept at a distance from the global event due to the war in Ukraine.
Banned as a nation, Russia will not broadcast the Games at home, according to Russian media, a decision with Cold War overtones dating back to Moscow’s boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
For decades, Russia has relied on sport as a tool for international prestige. The 2024 Olympics in France will remain a stain on its Olympic history, with Moscow represented by only a small team of 15 athletes, competing under a neutral banner.
“Russia will be a shadow of its former self at the Paris Olympics,” says Jules Boykoff, a U.S.-based Olympics expert. “The shift from Olympic power to pariah country has been swift and striking,” he adds.
As the war in Ukraine, sparked by the Russian invasion in February 2022, continues to rage, Ukrainian athletes have been advised by their sports officials to avoid the Russians in Paris.
kyiv is also paying a heavy sporting price for this war: more than 450 top Ukrainian athletes have been killed since the Russian aggression.
Several precedents
Russia’s international sports history is marked by numerous violations of Olympic tradition. In 2008, Moscow broke the truce of the Games then taking place in Beijing by launching a war against Georgia.
In 2014, a few months after the Sochi Olympics, the first revelations about doping in sport in Russia emerged, which would lead to the exposure in 2016 of an institutionalized doping system.
In response, Moscow will be sanctioned by the international Olympic authorities and its athletes forced to compete under a neutral banner at the Pyeongchang (2018), Tokyo (2021), and Beijing (2022) Olympic Games.
However, they have performed well at these global events, particularly at the Tokyo Summer Olympics, where more than 330 Russian athletes participated and brought home 71 medals, including 20 gold.
The Beijing Olympics had barely ended when Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of its Ukrainian neighbor on February 24, 2022.
In response, the IOC banned athletes from Russia and its ally Belarus from international sporting competitions, before ultimately deciding that they would be allowed to compete in the Paris Olympics, but under a neutral banner, and on condition that they did not support the Russian invasion and had no links to the military.
Russian athletes will be excluded from the opening ceremony on the Seine on Friday.
Moscow has condemned “unprecedented” discrimination against its athletes, some of whom have decided not to participate despite being authorised by sporting authorities.
” Nothing to see “
Only fifteen Russian athletes have accepted the invitation to Paris, including seven tennis players including Wimbledon 2023 semi-finalist Daniil Medvedev and 17-year-old revelation Mirra Andreeva.
The others are cyclists, swimmers, kayakers and trampolinists.
Wrestlers and judokas have decided to boycott the Games.
In Russia, the international competition has become the target of aggressive propaganda, with some sports leaders calling athletes who accepted the invitation to Paris “traitors” and a “homeless team.”
Not a single TV channel in Russia has announced that it will broadcast the Games. Contacted by AFP, the major channels did not respond. The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda conducted a study that found 87% of Russians did not plan to watch the Games, which was accessible on the IOC website.
“Without Russia there is no Olympics, so there is nothing to see,” according to a reader quoted by the newspaper.
Sports commentator Mikhail Polenov has criticised “political” censorship by Russian channels, deploring a “national disaster” in an interview with the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Another Russian commentator, Alexander Shmurnov, told AFP that the claim that the Russians were not interested in the Games was a “lie”.
“A lot of people in Russia would like to watch the Olympics,” says Shmurnov, who left the country after the invasion of Ukraine and will commentate on the events on his YouTube channel.
According to him, Russian athletes “suffer” from the growing isolation of their country, and the majority of them “are not propaganda warriors” of the Kremlin.
But according to Global Rights Compliance, an NGO based in The Hague, two-thirds of Russian athletes allowed to participate in the Olympics supported the war or have ties to the military.