On Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) announced that it rejects the appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) against the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to suspend its membership. Sport correspondent talks about how what happened in Lausanne is connected with another event that happened almost four thousand kilometers away.
Background Let us remind you that the IOC suspended the ROC’s membership in the organization for including the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions in its Olympic councils. This happened on October 5 last year, and a week later, at a session in Mumbai, the IOC suspended the ROC “until further notice” for “violating the Olympic Charter.”
No one had any illusions that the CAS realized that the ROC actually acted as programmed, since it was obliged to accept the Olympic councils of the regions that joined Russia into membership. As well as the hope that someone in this organization will think about why the IOC did not punish the ROC seven years ago for exactly the same actions in relation to the Olympic councils of Crimea and Sevastopol. If only for the reason that the Court of Arbitration for Sport was created by the International Olympic Committee and for a long time was one of its divisions. And even though at present the CAS is formally independent from the IOC, although it is located in several blocks of one city, hardly anyone assumed that the arbitrators would go against the founding fathers, especially in a political matter.
But the ROC did not count on the impartiality of the court in this matter. “The objectivity of CAS is critically low, and how can we even talk about it if CAS is headed by the Vice President of the IOC?” stated ROC President Stanislav Pozdnyakov at the Olympic meeting in December last year. “The point of our claim is that we are working for the future. When the political foam will subside, we must have all the legal actions taken by the regulations.»
The next such legal action could be an appeal to the Swiss Federal Court. True, it is impossible to challenge CAS decisions on the merits there. The grounds for filing such a protest can only be of a procedural nature. Whether it is worth filing such an appeal will no doubt be determined by lawyers working with OCD.
Why is the IOC afraid of tournaments in Russia? I would like to say something else here. That the period of any sanctions is a period of opportunity for self-development. And Russia is convincingly proving this right now — by holding the Future Games, grandiose in scale and concept, in Kazan, in which representatives of 107 countries of the world participate. Including those whose political leadership is extremely difficult to convict of sympathy for our country.
Just on Friday it became known that the Latvian Hockey Federation suspended the licenses of athletes who took part in the Games of the Future at the physical hockey tournament. Namely, members of the Latvian Baltic Select team. And this is a very remarkable event. Of course, it was not the decision of Latvian officials — it was just calculated, especially after on February 1, the Latvian Seimas banned athletes from their country from competing with Russians and Belarusians, even in a neutral status. It is noteworthy that the Latvian athletes, in principle, came to Kazan — although they could not help but guess what awaited them in their homeland after this. This is a clear example of the fact that competitions without any political overlay in the form of neutral statuses or anything else attract athletes from all countries.
The exclusion of Russians and Belarusians from international tournaments in many sports will soon be two years old, and all over the world, seditious words are increasingly being heard from those in the leadership of the IOC and a number of international sports federations, exposed to the influence of Western political elites, officials in the mouths of many leading athletes in the world — What is the fault of our colleagues who were illegally deprived of the right to their profession? Why are they discriminated against only on the basis of nationality?
So athletes go to places where no one is deprived of either the flag or the anthem. And it’s not for nothing that the IOC and other structures of world sports, which have lost all objectivity, are up in arms against the upcoming Friendship Games, threatening with terrible sanctions those who dare to come to Russia for them. They are simply afraid of losing their monopoly on international tournaments — and then collapsing when it becomes clear to everyone that this Colossus has feet of clay.
The more actively we need to fight injustice and organize events similar to the Games of the Future and Friendship. They will disqualify or deprive the licenses of some, others, thirds, fifths, tenths — and then suddenly it turns out that no one cares about it. And those who are now chopping with the sanction ax or, like CAS, supporting this chopping, will only have to disqualify themselves.