Canada’s support for Ukraine, a country placed by Russia at the heart of a war of aggression for almost a year, has just found its first flaw: the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) says it is “open to explore” today a possible return of Russian and Belarusian athletes for the next Olympic Games in Paris, in 2024, even if this prospect has been widely decried for days by the Ukrainian government, as well as by several of its allies. kyiv also qualifies this possible return as a gesture normalizing aggression and promoting “war, murder and destruction”.
Nevertheless, while claiming to follow the recommendation made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in February 2022 not to invite Russian and Belarusian athletes to participate in international competitions, the COC now considers that “the decision to exclude athletes solely on the basis of their nationality runs counter to the principles that are at the heart of the Olympic Movement” and says it is now ready “to explore a path leading to the inclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes [sous bannière] neutral,” COC chief executive and general secretary David Shoemaker said in a statement this week to the 2024 Olympics. To have to.
The idea of this reinstatement was put on the table by the IOC last week. It aroused the ire of Ukraine, which, through its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, last Friday denounced the “hypocrisy” of the International Olympic Committee and invited Thomas Bach, its president, to come and visit Bakhmout, the city devastated by Russian attacks and one of the hottest points currently on the front line. “Olympism and terrorist states must not cross paths,” he added in his daily video message on Sunday.
Russia and Belarus, allies and accomplices of the Kremlin in the war in Ukraine, have been excluded from most international competitions since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. However, Moscow is seeking, as the next Summer Games approach, the opening of which is scheduled for July 26, 2024 in Paris, to make this sanction obsolete.
“The Russians must participate in exactly the same conditions as all the other athletes, declared Tuesday the big boss of the Russian Olympism, Stanislav Pozdniakov, quoted by the news agency Tas in the service of the Kremlin. Not all additional conditions and criteria are welcome, especially those with a political component that is absolutely unacceptable to the Olympic Movement. »
Theatrical neutrality
“As long as Ukrainian athletes are not able to train safely, the return of Russians and Belarusians to the Olympics would be a completely unfair decision, comments in an interview with the To have to MacIntosh Ross, specialist in social issues related to sport and professor at the University of Western Ontario. The IOC must not allow this and thereby create a valid precedent for all nations: if you wage a war of aggression, your athletes will not be allowed to participate in the Olympic Games. We must put an end to this theatrical neutrality which becomes above all complicity. If the Olympic Games are synonymous with peace, the IOC now has the chance to prove it. »
Recall that in 2021, Russian athletes participated in the Tokyo Games under a neutral flag after Russia was banned in 2015 from the Olympic Movement for widespread doping fraud during the Sochi Olympics. In the Japanese capital, 45 of the 71 medals won by the Russians were won by athletes who were also members of the Central Sports Club of the Russian army, the Brussels-based International Military Sports Council reported at the time. However, since the start of the war, this army has been regularly condemned by the international community for the atrocities, murders, lootings, rapes committed and strikes against vital infrastructure carried out against Ukraine.
“The IOC watches with pleasure as Russia destroys Ukraine and then offers Russia a platform to promote the genocide” of Ukrainians, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaïlo Podoliak tweeted on Monday, while personally targeting Thomas Bach. . “Obviously the money that buys Olympic hypocrisy does not smell of Ukrainian blood. Right, Mr. Bach? ” he added.
Kyiv is threatening to boycott the next Olympics if Russian and Belarusian athletes were allowed to participate, including under neutral banners, Ukrainian Youth and Sports Minister Vadym Guttsait said. A prospect also envisaged this week by the Olympic Committee of Latvia, a Baltic republic which came on Wednesday to lay the foundations of a common front of countries which, at the call of Volodymyr Zelensky, are seeking to put pressure on the IOC to encourage it to maintain the total exclusion of Russia and Belarus from the 2024 Games.
“The decision to allow Russians and Belarusians to participate in the next Games [serait] immoral and wrong,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs said on the sidelines of a meeting with his counterparts from Poland, Estonia and Lithuania, who support kyiv in its campaign against the International Olympic Committee . Together they also threaten to boycott the next Olympic event.
In 2022, the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Australia had decided on a “diplomatic boycott” of the Winter Games in Beijing to protest against the genocide of the Uighurs orchestrated and planned by the Chinese authoritarian regime. against this Turkish-speaking minority in Xinjiang, in northern China. The possibility of a return of Russia and Belarus to the competition did not cause such a threat to appear in these great democracies. For now.
The IOC could decide the fate of Russian and Belarusian athletes by next summer, with the committee usually sending its official invitations to national committees a year before the start of competitions.
With Agence France-Presse