On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin slammed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for removing Russia from the Olympic movement. He accused it of exploiting the Games as a vehicle for bigotry and politics.
The Russian Olympic Committee was recently expelled from the IOC for recognizing regional organizations from four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow claims to have seized.
“Thanks to some of the leaders of the modern International Olympic Committee, we learned that an invitation to the Games is not an unconditional right of the best athletes, but a kind of privilege, and can be earned not by sporting results, but by political gestures that have nothing to do with sport at all,” Putin said at the “Russia – Sporting Power” meeting in the Urals town of Perm.
“And the fact that the Games itself may be employed as a tool of political pressure against individuals without a connection to politics. Highly offensive and racist ethnic prejudice.
Since its own Sochi Winter Games in 2014, where Russian athletes were shown to have profited for years from a significant state-sponsored doping scheme – something Moscow denied – Moscow has been at war with the Olympic movement.
As a result, starting in 2018, only neutral flags have been permitted for Russian athletes deemed doping-free to compete at the Olympics. Last week, the IOC remained calm over their potential admission to Paris 2024.
More athletic penalties have been imposed on Russia due to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, which it describes as a “special military operation,” including expulsion from international soccer. Putin praised new international sporting events among non-Western nations to Russia’s athletes on Thursday, particularly the BRICS group of developing nations’ upcoming games in Kazan.
3.2 billion roubles (about $33 million) will be invested in sports facilities in the occupied regions of Ukraine as part of plans for a new soccer league that will include ten clubs from those areas.
The most important thing right now, according to Stanislav Pozdnyakov, chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee, is to get athletes ready for the 2028 Games. He told the military news source Zvezda, “I’m certain that our athletes will be able to participate as a fully-fledged squad by then.
