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GENEVA: Russian athletes who do not support their country’s war in Ukraine can be admitted back into international sport, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said in an interview published on Friday.
“It’s about bringing back athletes with Russian passports who don’t support the war,” Bach told Italian daily Corriere della Sera, adding, “We have to think about the future.”
Most sports followed the International Olympic Committee’s recommendation in February and banned Russian teams and athletes from their competitions in the days following the country’s military invasion of Ukraine.
Exile until next year could actually become a broader Olympic ban as Russians begin to miss out on events that provide qualification for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
In an interview in Rome, Bach hinted that the IOC has spoken out on Russia’s path out of pariah status in recent rounds of conference calls with Olympic stakeholders.
“To be clear, this is not necessarily about bringing Russia back,” he said. “On the other hand – here comes our dilemma – this war was not started by Russian athletes.”
Bach offered no advice on how athletes could voice their opposition to the war when they opposed and criticized the Russian military with the potential for years in prison.
Some Russian athletes publicly supported the war in March and are complying with a ban imposed by their sports governing body.
Olympic gold medalist swimmer Evgeny Rylov appears at a pro-war rally attended by Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Gymnast Ivan Kulyak displays a pro-military “Z” symbol on his uniform at an international event.
According to media reports, the former Russian international athlete has been drafted into the army in the current mobilization. They include former heavyweight boxing champion Nikolai Valuev and footballer Diniar Villaletdinov.
Russians continued to compete in tennis and cycling as individuals during the war without national symbols such as the flag and national anthem, even when the team was banned.
In track and field, the Russians have only competed since 2015 as neutrals approved by the sport’s governing body as a state-backed doping scandal tainted the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Bach and the IOC have been criticized in the aftermath of the scandal for not being strict enough with Russian athletes who have competed at every Olympics since 2016, subjecting their drug tests to additional scrutiny or failing to use the national team name, flag and national anthem. as a neutral in the case of
Bach told Corriere della Sera that the IOC’s mission is to remain politically neutral, “to host the Olympics and to make sport a unity of people and humanity”.
“For all these reasons, we are currently in a real dilemma over the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” he suggested.
“We also have to see, study, monitor, how and when we can come back to accomplish our mission of getting everyone back, in whatever form.”
Bach also attended a Vatican-hosted sports forum in Rome, where Pope Francis praised sport as “an educational and social good, and it must remain so”.
“We should aim to give everyone the opportunity to participate in sport,” the Pope said, “to cultivate – so to speak, to receive ‘training’ – the values ​​of sport and translate them into virtues.”
Vatican officials have previously said they hope to one day send an IOC-sanctioned team to the Olympics.
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