The Swedish Olympic Committee failed to select athletes who would have been eligible for the Olympics. Now some of them have complained about it to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport CAS.
10:15•Updated 10:38
In July, the Swedish Olympic Committee failed to select athletes who would have been eligible for the Paris Olympics. Among the unselected athletes are general athletes Yolanda Ngarambe, Simon Sundström, Sara Lenman, Leo Magnusson and Rebecca Hallerth and a sailor Emil Bengtson have filed a complaint with the International Court of Arbitration for Sport, CAS.
About that news among others the Swedish public broadcasting company SVT.
Communications manager of the Swedish Olympic Committee, or SOK Lars Markusson explained to Urheilu at the beginning of July why none of the four eligible hurdlers were selected for the Olympics.
– SOK consists of 38 member organizations, i.e. in practice the association of Olympic sports. The SOK’s annual meeting decides according to which criteria athletes will be selected for the next Olympic Games. The staff and the trust management implement the will of the annual meeting in the matter. The annual meeting decided in April 2023 that athletes will be selected for the Paris Games who have a chance to place among the 12 in their sport, Larsson said at the time.
The athletes feel that the National Olympic Committee has no authority to intervene in the qualification processes defined by the International Olympic Committee.
– Me and five other athletes have decided to take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to test whether the SOK’s rules are allowed under the Olympic Charter, Sundström writes in his Instagram post.
He says that he considers it important not only for himself, but also for future athletes and those who have suffered from it in the past.
To finance the lawsuit, the athletes have set up a crowdfunding campaign. By Wednesday morning, approximately 113,000 kroner, or slightly less than 10,000 euros, had been donated to it. Their goal is to collect 500,000 kroner through the collection.