On Tuesday, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach hosted a media roundtable on the upcoming anniversary before the start of the Summer Olympics in Paris. They expected a clear statement from the head of the IOC about the participation of athletes from Russia and Belarus in the Games — but again they did not wait: he, as usual, managed with transparent hints without clear formulations. The correspondent discusses why the IOC is delaying the announcement of a seemingly already adopted decision.
Before the start of the roundtable, IOC Communications Director Mark Adams said more than 200 journalists had signed up and urged questions not related to the Paris 2024 Olympics not to be asked. «We are happy to answer them, but in private through our press service,» Adams said, probably hoping that the round table after such a prelude would be devoted exclusively to discussing the mascots of the Games, the required number of oysters and bottles of champagne to keep visitors to the Olympic venues satisfied, and other pleasant things related to the main sports festival of the four-year anniversary.
But it was not there. Although Bach in his introductory speech detailed, pompously and even somewhere touchingly described the expectations from the upcoming Olympics, all questions, with the exception of four or five, were devoted to the sore point of the modern sports movement — the non-participation (or participation — whatever) of Russian and Belarusian athletes in international tournaments. Although, in fact, there are enough urgent problems during the preparation of the Games, and these are not only searches in the office of the organizing committee and riots in the suburbs of Paris, which were nevertheless mentioned during the round table. There is also the expected transport collapse. For example, if someone has been in the capital of France in recent years, he knows that taking the subway there without the Olympics is still a test.
But almost all those who asked questions were still interested in only one topic — the admission of Russian and Belarusian athletes to the Olympics. They started from afar — they asked Bach about whether he was afraid of the unwillingness of the French authorities to see Russians and Belarusians in their country, as happened recently with the British authorities, because of the uncompromising position of which some qualifying competitions for the Games were postponed.
Passports of Russia and Belarus were held in France».
You can really remember one of them — the French Open Tennis Championship, where the rising star of this sport, Mirra Andreeva, was admired, not remembering that she was from Russia. As they admire, in fact, any other classy athlete. And not only in France, but also in the same Great Britain — Andreeva «lit» the audience quite recently at Wimbledon, and it is unlikely that at least one spectator refused to applaud a Russian girl only because of her nationality.
But the active part of the Western journalistic community at the round table with Bach did not let up and tried to find more and more new formulations in order to put the IOC president in a difficult position. However, it was impossible to unbalance this master sitting on two chairs.
“We intend to do everything to fulfill our mission – to unite the athletes of the entire planet in a peaceful competition,” Bach admonished with the intonation of a primary school teacher after another, as it might seem, tricky question. “We issued recommendations regarding the participation of athletes with Russian and Belarusian passports, they work very well, as past tournaments have shown. We also see the support of the international political community. Non-Aligned Movements We are confident that in a year we will be able to fulfill our mission, we are doing everything we can for this, and after a while we will make an appropriate decision.
But at the same time, Bach, of course, did not forget to recall that the IOC, while not punishing athletes for the actions of their governments, punishes those whom it considers responsible. “We don’t allow officials from Russia and Belarus to participate in international competitions, we don’t organize them on the territory of these countries,” the IOC President reported, without this time adding any characteristics like “politicized” for those tournaments with the participation of guests from different and sometimes even not completely friendly countries, which are very successful in our country.
“The head of the International Olympic Committee again stressed that there was no deadline for the official admission of Russian and Belarusian athletes to the Games in Paris, all questions about at least the approximate timing of this decision were gone, but journalistic skills, which, like sports, you can’t drink away, once still respected. “I have a long vacation ahead,” a journalist from the French edition of L’Equipe told Bach frankly. “Can I calmly go on it without fear that you will make a decision on Russia and Belarus at the Olympics in the near future, and I will have a job?”
After this question, Bach smiled for the first time at the entire round table and, in the language of the journalist who asked the question, replied that he could safely go to rest, saying that such a decision would most likely not be made in India before the October session of the IOC. Apparently, at that moment, all those colleagues of the French reporter, who were also going to rest in August-September, breathed a sigh of relief.
Actually, on this the main intrigue of the current round table was resolved, albeit in such a peculiar way. The head of the IOC continues to play Zhdun, although at the same time he more than transparently hinted that the decision to admit Russian and Belarusian athletes to the 2024 Olympics would be positive. So why doesn’t the IOC want to announce this now, so that those athletes who set themselves the goal of competing at the Games (for now we leave out the topic of the requirement to accept obviously discriminatory conditions of admission in a neutral status, we will return to it later), have already begun to prepare for them and bring their form to qualifying starts?
There are at least two reasons for this. First, the IOC, of course, continues to wait for developments in political circles. It is clear that if Bach officially announces the admission of athletes from Russia and Belarus to the Olympics now, this will cause a roar of indignation from those countries where they would not like to see Russians and Belarusians in the international arena in principle. They are well known — Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, as well as Ukraine itself. There is no doubt that the IOC hopes to convince them not to make sudden moves and threaten boycotts, which continues to happen periodically. In this regard, the statements of the same declarations of the G7 countries and the Non-Aligned Movement are in the hands of Bahu. As time goes by, and there, you see, some other major political player will sing along to the song from Lausanne.
Well, the second reason is that although the IOC has formulated the criteria for admitting athletes to international competitions in a neutral status, they have nothing to do with the Olympics. And this means that negotiations on their possible mitigation, quite possibly, are underway between the IOC and the Russian side. And time here can also play into the hands, because there are some precedents that can be used later. In this case, we are talking about the “case” of two-time Olympic champion and IOC member Elena Isinbayeva, whom, despite belonging to CSKA, military rank and multiple appearances in the company of the Russian political elite, the IOC considered it to be suitable for its criteria and allowed to further work. It is possible that Bach and the company are setting an example in this way — they say that international federations do not need to automatically exclude army athletes from the list of candidates for participation in the Olympics.
But here the same question arises again — will CSK members be required to make public statements about their own neutrality. There is a feeling that it is not by chance that Isinbayeva just now broke her months-long silence with her declaration that she is a «man of the world», forcing the leadership of Dagestan to raise the issue of renaming the stadium after herself in Makhachkala. It is possible that she was required to speak in social networks at the IOC, the press service of which literally the next day confirmed that there were no complaints about the world record holder in pole vaulting. If such a requirement was real, this, of course, as the sports leaders of Russia have repeatedly stated, is discrimination. However, to be subjected to it or not is already a matter of everyone's conscience.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.