Today, Tuesday 28th March, the executive board of the International Olympic Committee reconvenes to discuss participation of Russian and Belorussian athletes at the Olympic Games following pleas from the governments of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine that they should enforce a ban.
Both sides of this mounting argument are fairly presented in an excellent news article on Sky News today, (see link below).
IOC President, Thomas Bach, made his position clear in Germany last week when he said “If politics decides who can take part in a competition, then sport and athletes become tools of politics." Noble indeed, and hard to argue against you might say. But to my mind it’s a cowardly decision made by a weak organisation of people who are clinging onto an anachronistic set of values and desperate to preserve an outdated movement. The IOC refuse to draw a line in the sand and stand up and be counted like every other sporting body.
It’s a far from ideal choice that IOC is having to grapple with and plenty of people support their view that individual athletes should not be punished, but sometimes in life you simply have to choose between ‘bad’ and ‘badder’. This is one of those occasions. I can’t, for a moment, imagine that the IOC will be successful, I think that ultimately the threat of boycotts from multiple countries will see to that and make the Olympic Games a pointless an irrelevant event if they persist with their current policy. But it will be sad indeed if they capitulate simply as a result of the mounting pressure, just as they did on the eve of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, rather than because they believed it was the right and moral thing to do.
Judge for yourself:
‘Olympic chiefs urged to rule against Russians competing at Paris 2024 games’ Sky News: