Martin Dietze (Throatwobbler/Mangrove) 🍉

Should a country that kills athletes be allowed to participate in international athletic competitions? My vote is no.

Greed and immorality have won. Yesterday, July 7, the IOC provisionally reinstated the membership of the Russian Olympic Committee and rescinded its recommendations to international federations to ban Russian athletes from competitions. Formal restrictions remain in place: Russian officials are not invited, no events will be held in Russia, and the issue of the flag and anthem has been postponed "until the appropriate time." But the main step has already been taken: for the first time since 2022, the Olympic system has opened its doors to a state that is waging war. IOC officials found a convenient legal basis. The ROC’s membership was suspended in 2023 due to the inclusion of sports structures from the occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. The Russians amended their statutes, removing references to these structures - and the IOC decided the problem had been resolved. We are used to associating the Olympics, the international Olympic movement, and elite sports with peace. The mission of sport is to serve a peaceful society. This is enshrined in the Olympic Charter itself. However, the IOC has chosen a convenient interpretation of the principle of non-discrimination and every athlete’s right to sport. In this case, it is not simply about the right to participate in competitions, but about the right to propaganda and the normalization of violence as a state policy of the Russian regime. Some Russian athletes themselves take part in the war against Ukraine. Many of them support the Russian regime, accept awards from Putin, and whitewash crimes. Therefore, they cannot pretend to be "neutral" representatives of sport. Yet the IOC believes they cannot be discriminated against. The most cynical part of this story is that the IOC has retained the requirement that athletes must be "role models for a peaceful society." Checking this has been entrusted to the Russian Olympic Committee itself. In other words, a structure tied to the aggressor state will determine its own integrity. The IOC’s argumentation does not withstand criticism. IOC officials insist that athletes already need "equal access" to qualification for Los Angeles 2028. But qualification for Paris 2024 also took place during the war that argument did not work then. IOC officials insist that "sport is beyond politics." Yet the same IOC quite politically stripped Putin of the Olympic Order in 2022. The Olympic system did not adopt this decision unanimously. World Athletics confirmed a full ban for Russians and Belarusians just days earlier. FIFA and UEFA are also not lifting restrictions - in particular because teams from other countries simply refuse to play against Russia. Conversely, swimming and gymnastics surrendered back in the spring. This split is a map of institutional resilience: it shows where it still holds and where it no longer does. Money plays the main role here. Russian financial influence on world sport is well documented. The purest example is fencing. Alisher Usmanov, designated by the EU as an oligarch with particularly close ties to Putin, transferred about 80 million Swiss francs to the International Fencing Federation over three Olympic cycles; in 2020, his money accounted for 93% of its income. For decades, he financed federations in Africa and South America, for which these contributions were a matter of survival. The result: in 2024, despite sanctions from forty countries, Usmanov was re-elected president - 120 votes to 26. Russian money has become a structural part of the financing of the Olympic periphery - small federations whose votes elect the leadership of world sport. It is not the decision itself that is being bought. It is the environment in which such a decision looks natural. The IOC has long been vulnerable to this mechanism - it is enough to recall the Salt Lake City 2002 scandal. There is also a personal dimension: Bach exchanged awards with Usmanov, Putin was the first to congratulate both Bach in 2013 and Coventry in 2025. Coventry, while still a member of the executive board under Bach, advocated for the return of Russians. History knows cases of excluding aggressors - and knows no such return. Germany was not allowed to participate in the Games after both world wars: readmission came only after peace. South Africa was kept out of the Games for twenty-eight years and was only returned after the dismantling of apartheid. Yugoslavia was excluded in 1992 while the war in the Balkans was still ongoing. Russia is the first case where an aggressor is being brought back in the middle of a war that it itself started. However, there is one analogy: Berlin 1936, when the IOC similarly chose "neutrality" and gave the Nazi regime an international platform. The IOC’s decision is a pathetic example of immorality and greed. The tactic is clearly set by the Russians themselves: this is their style of small steps, each of which shifts the boundary of what is normal. Neutral athletes in 2023. Paris in 2024. Milan in winter. Belarus in May. The ROC in July. The next step is the return of the flag and anthem. Markers to watch: the decision on Russian symbols before the Youth Games in Dakar in October; whether World Athletics holds its position; and whether the IOC proceeds to full rehabilitation of Russia before Los Angeles without any ceasefire. If it does - the IOC will finally confirm that its principles have a price, and that price is not high.

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