Together with Norwegian NRK and Finnish EPN, SVT has identified ten Russian wrestlers who have changed sporting nations since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Six of them have qualified for the Olympics. They now compete for the countries of Bahrain, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Serbia.
In wrestling, unlike many other sports federations, there are no strict rules regarding citizenship or that the athlete must have lived in a country for a long time in order to be able to represent it sportingly.
– These changes that have taken place recently, they have no connection to the country they are changing to. All of a sudden you have two Russians you have to defeat instead of one, says Swedish national team manager Zakarias Tallroth.
One of the Russian wrestlers who has switched is Aleksandr Komarov, the reigning European 87kg Greco-Roman champion, who competes for Serbia.
He is ready for the Olympics, but does not want to appear for an interview for political reasons.
Kessidis: “It destroys the sport”
The Russian national team captain Gogi Koghuashvili, who previously coached Komarov, describes it as a betrayal of the Russian national team.
– I don’t like it when my athletes change countries. We train and prepare our athletes. And then they go to another country and are our rivals. It shouldn’t be like that, he says.
Even the Swedish wrestler, Alex Kessidis, who competes in the same weight class as Komarov, thinks the rules should be changed.
– Why not do as in football: when you represent the A team for a country, you can never change again. I think it’s very bad and ruins the sport, he says.
SVT Sport has applied several times to the international wrestling federation, but has been met with silence.
The association’s communications manager writes in a text message that he is “not sure that anyone is particularly keen to talk about this specific topic”.