IOC President Thomas Bach wants to reintegrate the banned athletes from Russia and Belarus into world sport and opens the door to the Olympic Games in 2024. In doing so, he once again proves how strange his worldview is.
Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine is gaining new momentum. After months of setbacks and stagnation, the Russian army of aggressor Vladimir Putin, reinforced by the mercenaries of the Wagner group, has achieved minor successes in recent weeks and, after brutal and costly fighting, has taken towns in the Bakhmut region. The political decision-makers of the Western world are struggling to deliver heavy weapons for the defenders - and in the middle of this extremely critical situation, IOC President Thomas Bach, the highest authority in world sport, whistles at the Luge World Championships in Oberhof, how much the Russian athletes are and miss athletes. Not just here at the Eiskanal, but in general.
Bach thus opens the door to bring the athletes affected by an international ban back into the community. Highly explosive world sports politics in the Thuringian winter sports idyll.
Bach once again answers the actually rhetorical question of how little sense one can have of timing and crimes committed by regimes in his own way. He invents a dimension that seems only accessible to him and the Messiah-like acting FIFA boss Gianni Infantino. While the world is getting more and more drawn into this war and secret services fear a new major offensive by Putin's army in the spring, Bach is counting on the reintegration of Russian athletes with a view to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris - although it is completely unclear whether Putin's army then perhaps still waging its brutal war of aggression against the neighboring country.
Basically, reintegration is an idea that should not be condemned but supported. The ban of an entire nation is a delicate matter and must constantly be checked for its proportionality. But here's the thing: Many Russian athletes are employed by the army (as in many other countries, by the way) and are therefore ambassadors for a murderous regime, regardless of whether they serve at the front, which they sometimes do, or Not. As of now, the proportionality for maintaining the international ban is maintained, even if, according to Bach, two special rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council are said to have recently raised "serious concerns" with the IOC. An "exclusion only because of the passport or the place of birth" is a possible violation of the United Nations' ban on discrimination, Bach reported.
In the IOC President's world, things look like this: "There is no talk of having Russian or Belarusian athletes in competitions," he explained as a guest at the Luge World Championships in Oberhof. The IOC is more concerned with "individual, neutral athletes without any reference to a nationality." Aryna Sabalenka gave an answer as to how this scenario could work and fail in reality. "Everyone knows that I'm a Belarusian player," confessed the "neutral" winner of the Australian Open. Incidentally, the tennis associations had not joined the ban.
How much athletes use the stage for themselves and for war propaganda was demonstrated last summer by gymnast Ivan Kuliak in a frightening way. The 20-year-old, who also had military training, competed with a 'Z' (war symbol) pasted over the Russian FA's logo to show his solidarity with the invasion of Ukraine. He tore the concept of neutrality to shreds. While some Russian athletes have taken a stand against the war, others remain silent out of fear or loudly and openly support Putin's invasion. Nobody can support their participation in the Olympic Games. But where is the line in a world between fear and propaganda? Who is a real opponent of war, who is a blood soldier?
Putin's aggression hardly knows any limits, the use of nuclear weapons seems to be the last. In his madness, he has everything in Ukraine shot at, not just military facilities. Attacks on critical infrastructure are open warfare against Ukrainian civilians. How can Bach seriously discuss the return of Russians to world sport these days? And even claim that there is an overwhelming majority for it. One would like to know which majority the IOC boss has constructed. Russia, China, North Korea, authoritarian regimes in Africa? Regimes that have no treaties with justice and peace?
It wouldn't come as a surprise, because for years Bach has preferred to snuggle up with autos than with democrats, creating a strange world for himself that one can only marvel at with wide eyes in this country. In his apolitical style of sport, he simply ignored the serious human rights violations in China at the Winter Games in Beijing. A year earlier, at the postponed Corona Games in Tokyo, he thanked the Japanese for allowing the sports world to be a guest. He ignored the mood of the people in the country, who absolutely wanted to do without these guests - and especially Bach. Against all odds he had won the games. As so often, he conjured up the connecting power of sport. And now he's doing it again.
But if that's exactly what one person doesn't care about, it's Putin. He's at war, doesn't want negotiations, he wants victory on the battlefield. And Putin, as he has proven often enough in sport, takes, but does not give. After the 2014 home Olympics, he raided Crimea. He first basked in the splendor of the world sporting event and then donned his brutal warlord mask once the international guests had departed. The world then also got the state doping scandal that was uncovered a few years later. Even then he could rely on Bach's gentleness. Instead of draconian punishments for this gigantic crime against the idea of sport - yes, it is trampled on everywhere else - the IOC boss wobbled around.
At the 2018 Olympic Games, the Russian athletes competed under the neutral Olympic flag - and found their bizarre home in the "House of Sports", a place decorated with hero memorabilia from Soviet and Russian stocks. The Russians were not allowed to have an official house - so what? They were also "neutral" in 2022. But what does not having an anthem, not hoisting the flag at award ceremonies, mean? For a warmonger like Putin, he means nothing.
The depth of Bach's strange love for Russia was revealed once again in a 2022 speech to the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, a non-profit association of international sports federations that participate in the Summer Olympics. He asked how fair competition in sport could be guaranteed if politicians acted according to their own interests and decided who could and couldn't take part in sporting events. "Today it's Russia and Belarus, tomorrow it's a different country. There is no country in the world that is loved by every government." Well, what Bach left out of his speech: It's not about love, but about a war of aggression that violates international law. But that wasn't what Bach meant when he said: "This is against all our principles." Rather, he meant the Russian exclusion from world sport, because: "If we leave the decision to the governments, then we will become a political instrument and cannot guarantee fair competition."
When it comes to posture, the IOC boss parries public pressure as confidently as he once did as a fencer on the planche. The day before the Beijing Games opened almost a year ago, Bach emphasized that the IOC "does not comment on political issues" otherwise "we get caught up in tensions and political forces. Then we risk the existence of the Olympic Games." At that time, Putin had hundreds of thousands of soldiers relocated to the state border with Ukraine and built up a powerful threat. Putin, Bach's weird friend, from whom he had only laboriously created a little distance last year, had exposed him once again. But Bach put up with it. For his IOC, "political neutrality" applies, everything else endangers "our mission to unite the world".
Sport has always been a political instrument. It doesn't matter how much Bach drives the myth of the non-political through his speeches. Sporting successes are repeatedly exploited by aggressive regimes for propaganda purposes. The Australian Open has just underlined how impossible it is to separate sport and politics. At the first major tennis tournament of the year, Russian flags flew with Putin's likeness. There were Russian battle cries and symbols of war. The father of tennis legend Novak Djokovic posed with Russian propagandists and then found himself in need of explanation. Just like Bach now.
The accusations from Kyiv towards Bach and his IOC are becoming more and more violent. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj also invited Bach to the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, which is currently particularly hard-fought, in order to get an idea of the destruction. "So that he can see with his own eyes that neutrality does not exist. It is obvious that every neutral banner of Russian athletes is stained with blood."
