MOSCOW, June 17, Svetlana Bonopartova. Former USSR national football team player Vladimir Ponomarev, in a conversation with, called the idea of allowing the Russian team to participate in the Olympics as a refugee team absurd.
Earlier, the Minister of Sports and Tourism of Poland, Kamil Bortnichuk, proposed creating a «team of refugees», which would include Belarusian and Russian «dissidents» at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. The Minister of Sports of the Russian Federation Oleg Matytsin said that if the International Olympic Committee (IOC) offers the Russians to compete at the Olympic Games in the status of refugees, this will be a manifestation of the policy of destroying the national sports system.
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"I agree with Matytsin, this, of course, is the destruction of the whole sport. What other refugees? What is this humiliation? And so without a flag and an anthem, so also refugees. This is some kind of absurdity. In general, I think that it is not necessary to participate in such competitions. Damn them! They are already losing a lot without Russian athletes. They don't play tennis because they know that without the Russians there will be nothing to watch there. Without us, it will not be a competition, but a parody,” Ponomarev said.
On March 28, the IOC Executive Board recommended that international federations allow Russian and Belarusian athletes who did not support the NWO as neutral athletes to participate in international competitions, while proposing not to consider teams from Russia as participants in international competitions in team sports. The IOC Executive Board also recommended that athletes associated with the armed forces or security agencies should not be allowed to compete.
“Nobody will agree to such conditions. Under no circumstances!