Athletistic / Olympic Games. The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will end on August 11. This sports holiday, at the request of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), took place without Russia: only 15 Russians took part in the competition, and they were in neutral status. Therefore, for our country, this time there was neither a holiday nor sports.

With the development of television, advertising burst onto tube TV screens around the world. It moved from newspapers, magazines and leaflets to television, because thanks to video broadcasts it was possible to show the product faster and more clearly. It was after this that the monetization of the Olympic Games began. Unfortunately, this process turned out not only to be positive: where there is big money, there is big politics. Thus, the IOC gradually sank deeper and deeper into the political jungle.

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After the shameful page of the Olympic movement associated with the boycott of two Olympic Games – Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 – by representatives of different political camps, it seems that the IOC was able to learn a lesson from this situation. However, the memory pill stopped working at the very moment of the most important political events of the last decade.

After the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the political map of the world changed: Crimea became a subject of the Russian Federation. And a year later, a doping scandal erupted involving the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov. And if the IOC failed to prevent the participation of many Russian athletes at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, who successfully challenged the organization’s tyranny at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), then things got even worse. At the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang (South Korea), the IOC simply did not invite the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), personally sending invitations only to the Russian athletes it wanted. For example, the best skier on the planet at that time, Sergei Ustyugov, did not take part in these Olympics.

Photo source: Tour de Ski

Another blatant act of injustice was the absence of six-time Olympic short track champion Viktor Ahn among the invitees. The Koreans really did not want a man they themselves had rejected, expelling him from the national team in 2010, to shine at their country’s Olympics.

Between the 2018 Winter Olympics and the 2020 Summer Games, the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) attempted to ban all Russian sports for four years. However, CAS applied a 50% reduction and decided to ban Russian athletes from competing at the Olympics and World Championships under the national flag and anthem for two years.

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As a result, in 2021, the Russians went to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo (the Olympics were postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic) as part of the Russian Olympic Committee team. This was a relatively compromise solution, and at that time it was perceived more positively in Russia. According to a similar scheme, the Russians performed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing (China). But then complete chaos began.

On February 24, the SVO began in Ukraine. World history, unfortunately, is full of examples of armed conflicts between countries. But neither before nor after (the example of Israel and Palestine) did the IOC exclude entire countries from participating in the Olympic Games. But it took Russia and removed it. At first, Thomas Bach argued that these sanctions were imposed because of Russia’s violation of the Olympic Truce. Then, the IOC representatives claimed that they feared for the lives and health of Russian athletes and therefore did not allow them to participate in international competitions yet. In their latest version, Thomas Bach and his associates claim that Russian sports should suffer from the inclusion of representatives of the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions in the Republic of China.

Photo source: IOC

The Olympic motto was first pronounced by the French priest Henri Didon at the opening of sports competitions at his college. Baron Pierre de Coubertin liked these words so much that the motto “Faster, stronger, higher” was approved by the first Olympic Congress in 1894. And already in 1931 it was transformed into “Faster. Higher. Stronger”. It seems that this is precisely the motto that now guides the IOC in its attempts to exclude Russian athletes from international sports as much as possible.

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It is funny that in 2021 the Executive Committee of the International Olympic Committee supported the proposal of its President Thomas Bach to add the word “Together” to the motto. Now it looks like this: “Faster, higher, stronger – together”. By an inexplicable decision, the IOC excluded the largest and one of the most powerful sports countries in the world from the “together”. And this is unlikely to change after Bach leaves his post as President of the International Olympic Committee.

Nikita Serbakov, Athletistic



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