“O sport, you are Peace!” — In Putin’s Russia, this famous phrase often used in Soviet times (as hypocritical as it is) has turned into its Orwellian opposite. Everything is war for Putin: energy, economy, food, information, sport… the list goes on.
The invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 did not just coincide with the Beijing and Sochi Olympics. As for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, it was just an opportunity for Russian propaganda to entertain and numb tempers before what was to come. Finally, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did not happen by accident days after the Beijing Olympics. If you don’t see parallels, you’ve chosen to be blind.
Russia has followed a strict militarist and imperialist regime for more than two decades. The outpouring of chauvinism typical of sporting events has become an obvious Kremlin tool to galvanize Russians and prepare the ground for acts of aggression. Putin, like a former KGB officer, used Russian sports victories to advance his political agenda, systematically skewing the results. Russia’s dirty ways in recent decades, such as using banned doping substances or bribing international sports officials, are well known to the rest of the world.
Sport, for Putin, is an additional tool to establish “the brave new world”, a world without rules. Russia must always win, whether through doping, corruption, war or by inflicting unimaginable suffering on its neighbors. Putin, like any dictator, believes there is only one rule: the rule of the strongest. Everything else – honesty, civility and transparency – is a joke for dictators.
For too long, the world has been ready to turn a blind eye to Russia’s behavior, blaming it on wounded pride of a former empire and other ideological nonsense. Time and time again the world has allowed Russia to win despite breaking all the rules. The roles are finally reversed. Russia no longer wins.
In February 2022, drunk with imperial pride, the Russian military launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the most gruesome war in Europe’s recent history – but it was repelled by the brave Ukrainian people. . Goliath is losing in this eternal story of David against Goliath. Ukraine ends Russian imperialism with the support of freedom-loving countries. Russia, like a drug addict, urgently needs a new dose, and she is determined to get it from the International Olympic Committee, which seems to have a mysterious historical fondness for dictators. The IOC’s decision to allow Russian and Belarusian participation under the neutral flag at the Paris Olympics would be yet another heinous act of collaboration with a genocidal regime. With or without a Russian flag, the IOC simply prefers to turn a blind eye to crimes and allow the Kremlin dictator to use sport for propaganda purposes, as he did with Hitler in 1936.
“Let’s leave politics out of sport,” say supporters of the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in sports arenas. They prefer to ignore the fact that many of these athletes are serving military officers. For example, 45 of the 71 medals won by the Russian team at the Tokyo Olympics were won by members of the Central Sports Club of the Russian Armed Forces. The Russians do not hide it, they are proud of it. Sport, the state, propaganda and the army are inseparable in Russia.
In fact, Putin has already introduced politics into sport. And not just politics, but also war crimes. He is now officially charged with a war crime – stealing Ukrainian children – by the International Criminal Court. And it is an irreversible decision, no matter how hard some people try to ignore Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine or how eager they are to profit from yet another Russian injection of filthy substances into sport.
There is no question of Russian or Belarusian athletes participating in the Paris Olympics (or, for that matter, any other major sporting event).
“We seem to be somewhere in between” [entre les Russes et les Ukrainiens]. No quote from Thomas Bach, the IOC President, describes the IOC’s inaction better than these words during his March 28 press conference. The IOC does not want to protect international sport from Russian propaganda and war, it prefers to be “somewhere in between”.
And it’s not about neutrality or even hypocrisy. It’s much worse than that. Imagine a police officer looking away from a murder and saying “It seems to me that I was somewhere between the murderer and the victim”?
Unfortunately, the IOC systematically fails to find the courage to uphold the principles of the Olympic Charter. Instead, he has only one hurry: to go down in history once again as having sought to appease an aggressor, thus paving the way for a world without rules. We are no longer in 1936. Ukraine does not accept and will not accept this unhealthy policy.