The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that it has banned the Russian Olympic Committee from operating with immediate effect. Taina Susiluoto, CEO of the Finnish Olympic Committee, explains the background behind the decision.
Mika Halonen,
Johannes Oikarinen
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that it has suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), effective immediately. The reason for the decision is that last week the ROC has formalized the sports organizations in the territories it illegally seized from Ukraine as its sub-organizations.
– The Russian Olympic Committee no longer has the right to act as a national Olympic committee, and it does not receive any funding from the Olympic movement. The ROC’s announcement violates the Basic Document of the International Olympic Movement because it violates the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian Olympic Committee, the IOC said, referring to the ROC’s decision to recognize the regional organizations of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.
When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian and Belarusian athletes and teams were widely banned from international sports.
At the end of March 2023, the board of the International Olympic Committee recommended that individual athletes from Russia and Belarus be accepted back into international competitions without country codes under certain conditions. In practice, the IOC transferred responsibility for the competition rights of Russians and Belarusians to international sports federations.
Also, the now shelved decision does not yet mean that Russian athletes will not be able to participate in next summer’s Olympics in Paris as neutral athletes.
Read more: Russian athletes can already compete in these sports – many are questioning Finland’s position behind the scenes
The International Paralympic Committee decided a week and a half ago that Russian and Belarusian athletes will be able to participate in the Paralympics next year. That is why it is expected that the International Olympic Committee would now make a similar decision when it meets in Mumbai, India at the end of the week.
Chairman of the IOC Athletes’ Commission Emma Terho stated to Urheilu that there is a discussion in India about Russians and Belarusians competing, but he doesn’t think any actual decision will come.
– I don’t see that it is timely to make a decision at the moment. If a favorable decision is made, it is practically impossible to back out.
So has anything changed now?
The decision made on Thursday will therefore not affect the upcoming decisions of the IOC regarding the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in the Olympics.
Chief of Staff of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak however, considered the recent decision important.
– We communicated with our partners that sports cannot stay out of politics when a terrorist country carries out the genocide in Ukraine and uses athletes as propaganda, Yermak commented according to Reuters.
The Russian Olympic Committee, on the other hand, considers the decision “politically motivated”.
“Today, the IOC took another harmful decision with obvious political motives,” the ROC said in a statement, referring to the country’s athletes’ shutdown in February 2022.
CEO of the Finnish Olympic Committee Taina Susiluoto according to the recent decision is “right-oriented, good and orderly”. Susiluoto emphasizes that Finland, together with the Nordic countries, has continued to influence that it is not the right time for the Russians to return to sports.
– In practice, this means that the IOC does not finance the Russian Olympic Committee through solidarity money, the Russian Olympic Committee does not have the opportunity to participate in the annual meetings or the activities of the IOC. The Russian Olympic Committee also does not have the right to send teams to multi-sport competitions, says Susiluoto.
Now, of course, one wonders why the IOC has not previously punished the Russian Olympic Committee for the attack on Ukraine, but only now on the basis that the ROC annexed the occupied Ukrainian territories.
– This is a fault related to sports. Legally speaking, the IOC now had the right to make such a suspension, when the Russian Olympic Committee has annexed parts of another country to itself in the field of sports, Susiluoto reasons.
So there is still a chance that Russian athletes will be seen as neutral athletes in Paris, so to speak.
– Currently, the international sports federations have the power to decide whether neutral individual athletes can qualify for the Paris Olympics. International sports are in a mess at this point. There are half of the sports that have neutral Russian athletes and half that don’t, Susiluoto admits.