Facing off at the Olympic Games

Athletes talk about boycott

Text Jonathan Crane, DW Sports

The message was clear, concise and unsurprisingly for a former world champion heavyweight boxer packed a punch.

“The Russians are Olympic champions in crimes against civilians,” said the messenger, Vladimir Klitschko, standing in front of the shell of a missile-hit building. “They have the gold medal in the deportation of children and rape of women.”

And then, still staring steely-eyed into the camera of his mobile phone, Klitschko addressed the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, directly.

“Do not make this monumental mistake,” said the boxer, a gold medalist at the Atlanta Games in 1996.

“History will judge you.”

The U-turn

With Russia’s war in Ukraine showing no sign of stopping any time soon, Klitschko is among a number of Ukrainian Olympians who have added their voices to a growing debate in world sport.

They cannot bear the idea of Russian athletes being allowed to compete at next year’s Paris Games when Russian missiles are raining down on Ukraine, especially when many of their countrymen and women won’t get the same chance because of Russia’s actions.

As campaign groups Global Athlete and Athletes for Ukraine noted in a joint statement earlier this year, such a move would suggest the IOC “endorses Russia’s brutal war and invasion of Ukraine (…) strengthening Russia’s propaganda machine, empowering the Putin regime and undermining peace.”

The problem, however, is that the IOC sees things very differently. It says sport should be autonomous, with sports bodies having the sole responsibility to decide which athletes can take part in international competitions.

In March, the organization said some Russians and Belarusians (Belarus is a major ally of Russia) should be allowed to participate as so-called Individual Neutral Athletes, without their national flags or anthems, citing their human rights: “Sanctions cannot solely be based on a person holding a passport from a particular nation.”

After recommending that global sports bodies ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from international competitions when the war broke out last year, the IOC, with Olympic qualifying events now getting underway, has completely reversed course and is expecting sports bodies to follow its lead.

“The International Olympic Committee has a strong recent track record of bending over backwards to include Russia in the Olympics, no matter what they do,” said Jules Boykoff, a professor of political science at Pacific University and author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics.”

“There’s no question that they’ve shifted their position rather conspicuously over time, while showing a pretty obvious tolerance for tyranny coming from Russia.”

German fencer Lea Krüger thinks athletes are put in a tough position.

The threat

What the IOC might not have expected, though, was the strength of the backlash to its plan, first mooted in January, which it said was backed by the “vast majority” of Olympic stakeholders.

Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor to the west, immediately broke rank and mentioned the “B” word: a boycott.

Its sports minister, Kamil Bortniczuk claimed that a coalition of boycotting countries would be “broad enough to make holding the Games pointless.” Elaborating on his thoughts in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bortniczuk said: “Maybe we have to give an ultimatum: Either Russia or us.”

Behind the scenes, Ukraine has been lobbying the IOC to change its position. Its sports minister, Vadym Guttsait, who also heads the country’s Olympic Committee, says at least 220 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have died as a result of Russia’s invasion. More than 350 sports facilities are said to have been destroyed.

“Why in conversations about the protection of the rights of athletes in aggressor countries, no words are heard about the protection of the rights of those people who were attacked and who have been killed for almost a year?” Guttsait wrote in February in a leaked letter to the IOC’s Bach.

Not that many Ukrainian athletes even want to share the field of play with competitors from Russia and Belarus.

“They died for me, they don’t exist in my life,” high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, a bronze medalist at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, told DW earlier this year. “Russia is a terrorist state.”

The history

The talk of a boycott has forced the IOC to go on the defensive.

“It is extremely regretful to escalate this discussion with a threat of a boycott at this premature stage," it wrote in an extensive Q&A document on its website. "As history has shown, previous boycotts did not achieve their political ends and served only to punish the athletes.”

The last time that happened on a major scale was the tit-for-tat boycotts during the Cold War era. The United States led a more than 60-country boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, and the Soviet Union and 14 other Eastern bloc states retaliated by skipping the Los Angeles Games four years later.

The Moscow boycott was particularly painful for a certain Thomas Bach, back then a fencer for West Germany. He won the gold medal in the team event at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. But because his country was among those not taking part in Moscow, he was denied the chance to defend the title. For Bach, boycotts are personal.

Critics of his organization’s U-turn point to the banning of South African athletes from the Olympics during apartheid. Attempting to play down this argument in its Q&A document, the IOC emphasized that sportspeople were also affected by the South African government’s discriminatory race laws, and that the ban was underpinned by UN sanctions.

What it neglected to mention, however, is that Russia can veto any UN resolution due to its status as a permanent member of the Security Council. In other words: sanctions in this case would never be passed.

“There truly is no outside force of accountability when it comes to the Olympics,” Boykoff said. “That allows the International Olympic Committee to engage in selective morality, saying in one case, ’Yeah, now the United Nations is really valuable and we value their work,’ and then in other cases, ’Nah, not so much.’”

“If they just obeyed their own charter, it would be pretty clear that they would

Protesters outside the Czech Olympic Committee in Prague.

The athletes

Even if the IOC doesn’t budge from its current plan, an all-out sporting boycott remains unlikely. It is thought the coalition of countries seriously contemplating such a move will eventually wilt away to just Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states.

Germany, which won’t act without a wide consensus, is a better measure of what will happen.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who is responsible for sport, condemned the IOC’s plan as “a slap in the face of Ukrainian athletes.” Likewise, the German Olympic Committee, the DOSB, opposes the readmission of Russia and Belarus, saying: “Now is not the right time.” But both Faeser and the DOSB reject the idea of a boycott. And the reason for that is the athletes.

“It’s our careers,” said Lea Krüger, a German national team fencer. “If we decide not to fence, we will give up our Olympic dreams and we will also give a stage to the Russians.”

For Paris hopeful Krüger, the debate has hit very close to home.

In March, fencing became the first Olympic sport to vote to overturn a ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes competing in its events, in line with the IOC’s new recommendations.

Until last year, the International Fencing Federation’s president and main donor was Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. He left his position because of the war, as did Stanislav Pozdnyakov, who led the European Fencing Confederation. Pozdnyakov also happens to be the president of the Russian Olympic Committee; his daughter, Sofia, is a Russian fencer and double gold medalist in Tokyo.

“You see the connection between sports politics, fencing and Russia is very intense,” Krüger said. “The influence of Russia is huge in the sports system.”

The dilemma

One of the conditions for Russians and Belarusians to be able to compete in Paris is that they have not actively supported the war in Ukraine. But separating the athlete from the politics, and the war, is no easy task. According to Ukraine’s foreign ministry, 45 of Russia’s 71 medalists in Tokyo were members of the army club CSKA Moscow.

In February, a group of 34 countries (which includes Germany), who want to keep Russian and Belarusian athletes out of the Olympics, called on the IOC to clarify how it would guarantee neutrality.

The IOC has proposed excluding Russians and Belarusians from team events, as well as athletes who actively support the war (for example, posing in photos or at events with the letter “Z” a Russian military symbol) and who are contracted to the military.

“In order to ensure a harmonized interpretation of these criteria, the IFs (international federations) should consider creating a single independent panel under the umbrella of the IF associations (…) to take the decisions,” the IOC wrote in a guidance note.

Krüger accuses the IOC of effectively passing the buck, with athletes like her paying the price.

“None of these organizations take responsibility for their decisions,” she said. “The federations give the responsibility to the IOC and the IOC gives it back to the international federations.”

“And now we have the situation where I will be on the piste (the strip on which fencers compete) with a Russian athlete, and I have to decide how to act. In the end it’s on us, the athletes, to take responsibility for something we never decided.”

The 27-year-old Krüger, who’s a member of the DOSB’s athletes’ commission and a representative for the independent group Athletes Germany, says she and her teammates have already discussed the situation but don’t know what they will do yet.

“Now I have to make a decision about my career and the political things I stand for, and I think I should never be in this position as an athlete,” she said.