Olympics 2024 | Kremlin uses ban as another arrow to shoot at the West

Paris: More than 10,500 athletes from some 200 countries will participate in the Olympic Games in Paris, but only 15 of them will be from Russia. They will compete without the accompaniment of the Russian flag or its national anthem.

Back in Russia, the competition will not be shown on television for the first time since 1984. And state TV is paying little attention to the Games, other than to point out flaws in the Games in commentary that smacks of sour grapes.

News segments, for instance, have reported on the cleanup of the Seine, which they concluded would inevitably fill up with sewage again. And media commentators expressed disgust that a drag queen carried the Olympic torch -- which is antithetical to Russia's increasing emphasis on what it calls "traditional values" and its crackdown on LGBTQ+ expression.

It's quite a comedown for Russia, a traditional Olympic powerhouse that for years used the competition as a way to project power and foster national pride, and often finished first in the final medal count. And it represents the price the country is paying for its invasion of Ukraine two years ago and the daily mayhem it inflicts there.

Banned from participating because of the war, Moscow has chosen to spurn the Games in return. It is framing them as part of the same narrative that President Vladimir Putin has used to stoke nationalism at home: that Russia is engaged in an existential standoff with a Western alliance bent on the country's humiliation.

"No one wants to recognize the real reason for the increased barriers to Russia's participation," said Dmitry Navosha, a Belarusian who co-founded a prominent sports website in Russia but has left the country and opposes the invasion of Ukraine. "The reason is the war." And in Russia, he said, "this fact is simply hidden and interpreted as 'the West doesn't like Russia, so they don't let us go anywhere.'"

Still, the Kremlin and its supporters insist the decision to bar Russia is borne of American hypocrisy.

"So now we mix sports and politics?" Dmitry V. Gubernyev, a well-known Russian sports announcer, said in an interview. "Americans, who went to Iraq and later acknowledged the mistake," he added, implying that the United States was never sanctioned in the sports world for waging wars. "And who invaded Vietnam, acknowledged later -- not by you and me, but by Biden -- as a mistake?"

In 2017, the International Olympic Committee suspended Russia's team from participating until the end of 2022 because of a doping scandal. Even so, it sent some of the largest contingents to the Games -- 335 in Tokyo three years ago -- where Russian athletes participated and won medals under a "neutral" designation.

In 2022, the IOC banned Russian athletes again in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The suspension also extends to athletes from Belarus, Russia's neighboring vassal state, whose leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has supported Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Last year, the IOC decided to allow individual Russian athletes to participate if they met strict requirements for participation.

Russian and Belarusian athletes and personnel "who actively support the war" or are contracted to their country's military or national security agencies are ineligible to participate.

The IOC also ruled that no Russian or Belarusian state official could be accredited for the Games. Many media representatives from both countries were also prohibited from attending, further irritating the Kremlin.

Russian sports organizations, commentators and general society are divided over participation in these circumstances.

The head of Russia's Olympic Committee, Stanislav Pozdnyakov, has maligned the athletes who chose to participate, in part because about half of them are based outside of Russia. He called them "foreign agents," a derogatory designation for people the authorities consider to be working against the national interest.

The Russian Olympic Committee has also made payouts of more than 200 million rubles ($2.3 million) to at least 245 athletes who could not or chose not to compete, the body's director general told RIA Novosti.

There was a public pressure campaign inside Russia to persuade athletes to withdraw. At least 20 Russian athletes who qualified and met the criteria for competing rejected the invitations -- either because their federation decided not to participate or out of solidarity with other team members who were not greenlit by the Olympic committee.

In a statement, the Russian Wrestling Federation said that it "would not allow the spirit of the Russian team to be broken." The group said it would rather none of its athletes participate than only a few who qualified.

The judo team also complained that "of the 17 judokas who received the Olympic rating, the IOC allowed only four to participate in the Olympics." It refused to let those who qualified compete under what it called "humiliating conditions."

The Kremlin has left the thorny decisions on who should participate to the federations and their athletes.

"Each athlete makes such decisions independently," said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. "As for those who had the opportunity and did not go, each federation has its own circumstances, agreements, collective opinions and decisions. This needs to be respected."

Ukraine has actively lobbied against some athletes who are participating. For instance, it called for the IOC to exclude Russian gymnast Angela Bladtseva, 18, from trampoline jumping. Kommersant, a Russian business daily, reported that Ukrainian officials had complained because Bladtseva competed in the Russian city of Krasnodar last year against a background with the pro-war symbol "Z" and the slogan "We do not abandon our own." She will participate in the Paris Games.

The war has caused other divisions over Russia's Olympic participation. Military bloggers, who are generally full-throated supporters of Russia's army, have criticized St. Petersburg for offering cash awards to athletes who earn medals, calling it a form of betrayal.

"We are literally collecting pennies to help the front throughout the country, while they are paying traitors," wrote one blogger with 257,000 followers on Telegram, using a slur for LGBTQ+ people to refer to those who proposed the payments.

The scant Russian presence this year feels like a repetition of the 1980s, Navosha said. The United States led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leading to a Russian boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

"We have a very clear historical parallel that directly indicates where Russia is now -- exactly where the Soviet Union was in 1980," he said. "A direct, undisguised confrontation with the Western world, in which sport became an instrument of the confrontation."

There is one notable difference, he added. In 1984, the Soviet Union organized its own Olympic-style competition, Druzhba-84, or the Friendship Games. The event was portrayed as evidence that the socialist way of life "provides more favorable facilities for the human beings' all-round physical and spiritual development." Athletes from about 50 countries participated.

This time around, a version known as Druzhba-24, was scheduled to take place in September by Putin's decree. Organizers allocated money and planned competition in more than 30 summer sports, but it was postponed until at least next year, Navosha said, a sign that not enough countries were on board to compete.

"We understand that Russia's circle of allies is much smaller now than it was back then, and it is too small to hold their ersatz Olympics," Navosha said.

Gubernyev said he was in favor of all athletes who qualified competing, even if he believed the conditions were unfair. He added that he, like other Russians who love sports, would find a way to watch the Games.

But he warned that the exclusion from Paris would foster resentment in a generation of athletes, and Russians in general, against the West: "A person does sports to win an Olympic medal."

"Against the background of these decisions, another round of confrontation will be born," he said. "Because there are people who really want to broaden their horizons, see Europe and show the world what they can do. That wasn't given to them, so their response will wind up being, 'Go to hell.'"