Can we make it make sense, please?
Case no. 1:
Last month, the International Olympic Committee’s policy-making executive board published “strict eligibility conditions” for so-called “Individual Neutral Athletes,” or in IOC speak, AINs, for the forthcoming Paris 2024 Games.
These conditions were based on six detailed recommendations issued by the same board last March 28. Key, No. 3 and 4:
- No. 3: Russian or Belarusian ‘Athletes who actively support the war [in Ukraine] will not be eligible to be entered or to compete. Support personnel who actively support the war will not be entered.”
- No. 4: “Athletes who are contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies will not be eligible to be entered or to compete. Support personnel who are contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies will not be entered.”
OK, got it.
But now come our friends in France, proudly boasting of their armée de champions, the Army of Champions, a project — since 2014 — that offers “unique support” to more than 200 “high-level athletes” who, indeed, are “full members of the Ministry of the Armed Forces” with, it should be noted, “their acculturation to military values …essential in their career and in their life as sustained athletes.”
Indeed, “for about a week, high-level Defense athletes meet to participate in military activities with their comrades engaged in the armed forces.”
Dear reader, what goal does the armée de champions project serve?
It could not be more plain:
“It also provides, therefore, significant support in supporting these excellent athletes to the Ministry of Sports and the Olympic Games and to the sports federations which provide all their resources in terms of preparation and equipment.”
Solène Butruille, for instance, was part of the silver medal-winning French foil team at the 2023 world fencing championships.
Ysaora Thibus, Solène Butruille, Morgane Patru and Pauline Ranvie with their silver medals in women’s team foil at the FIE fencing worlds last July 29 in Milan // Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
Best to use the government-written cutline because it says it all: ‘Soldier Solène Butruille is a high-level Defense athlete - © Ministry of the Armed Forces’
Assuming she’s still part of the 2024 team, she could compete in Paris. She is for sure, per No. 4, “contracted” to the French military. But someone from Russia (or Belarus) who “actively supports the war” — vague phraseology that any law student could tear apart in 10 seconds — cannot?
FrancsJeux, the French-language Olympic news website, reports that the armée de champions won a third of the French team’s medals at the Tokyo 2020 Games — half of which were gold. It also says that since the modern Games began, in Athens in 1896, more than half of French medals have been won by military athletes.
It’s not just the French running these sorts of initiatives. The United States Army proudly oversees its WCAP, World Class Athlete Program. Follow along on Instagram!
Make it make sense. Please.
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Case No. 2:
Russia’s Maria Lasitskene is the Tokyo 2020 Olympic high jump champion. As things stand, she cannot go to Paris.
What did she — personally — do wrong?
Nothing.
She is being held responsible — personally — for the actions of her government.
Other Russians, too.
In this case by World Athletics, headed by Sebastian Coe. The federation has decided no Russians, none, will compete at the Olympics.
The way this works, for those who are not closely following the process, is it is not the IOC that is deciding what’s what.
Each federation gets to decide what to do with the Russians (and the Belarusians). The IOC ratifies a federation decision about this athlete or that.
“It’s impossible to come to terms with this,” Lasitskene said this week. “I still can’t understand my condition regarding the Olympic Games.
“I’m a sober person and I understand the impossibility of my trip to Paris this year. But I didn’t let go of this situation, no matter how stupid it looks. I have disbelief this could happen, although we already went through this [a ban] in 2016 at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.”
Coe has for years taken a hard line when it comes to the Russians, who have made life difficult for him, for World Athletics and, moreover, for the IOC because of rampant violations of the doping code and more.
Noted.
Let’s be clear — more, blunt — about this point: the Russians, speaking generally, have been a pain in the backside for a great many people, interests, stakeholders in the Olympic world.
That is, perversely, all the more reason to include them in Paris. The way this works is elemental: you don’t get to invite to the party only the people you like. That’s not how you go about seeking to build peace, and the IOC is, at its core, a peace-building institution.
Also noted: I have known Coe for the better part of 25 years. It is quite possible to disagree with him about policy, in public, as in these next few paragraphs, and still carry on with deep and abiding respect for each other. This is a lesson for many at the highest levels of the Olympic world.
In that spirit:
Coe ran in the U.S.-led boycotted 1980 Moscow Games, winning two medals, one gold. He is famously anti-boycott.
In 2024, it would make for an excellent debate at an Oxford or Cambridge about what constitutes a World Athletics-driven “boycott” of Russia and what amounts to a punitive exercise in keeping them out that is indisputably and irrevocably at odds with the fundamental principle of the Olympic charter, which calls for inclusion.
Because, in the end, who gets punished? Vladimir Putin? Or the athletes?
What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe say? What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe tell the then British Olympic Assn. chair Denis Follows, who defied the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ensured a British team went to Moscow? Maybe, you know, thanks for letting me live my dream? Which is what an athlete asks?
Follows at the time to the British foreign select committee: “Sport helps to bridge the gulf between nations. It is the most unifying thing in the world today.”
How, exactly, is the world going to punish Putin by not having Maria Lasitskene in Paris?
He’s planning his own BRICS games, a disruptor the IOC is understandably wary of.
As well as an esports extravaganza.
The only ones hurt from not having her there are — her. And us. She is a talent. Whose talents deserve to be seen, and praised, or not, whatever. A duel with Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh, the 2023 Budapest world champion, would be one of the most-anticipated nights of track and field at the Games.
Gold medalist Maria Lasitskene, left, and Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh, the bronze medalist, at the close of the women’s high jump at the Tokyo Games // Photo by ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
Here was Coe last year, about the World Athletics decision to keep the Russians out:
“We made that decision a few days after the illegal invasion of a sovereign state. We did it for integrity reasons, it wasn’t about passports or politics.”
It was exactly about politics. Same as when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Difference: Ukraine is way closer to Britain than Afghanistan. And, as it was reported in the days immediately after the invasion on the British television network ITN, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, Third World nation, this is Europe.” And on the BBC: “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair ... being killed every day.”
Coe went on, “You had a nation that could no longer compete and its infrastructure was being destroyed,” saying the federation could not allow “athletes from countries that were causing that to participate. It just got stuck in my throat, it was as simple as that, and that’s how the rest of the sport felt. Athletics won’t be on the wrong side of history.”
Except — how is it that Russian athletes are the ones at fault? It’s the Russian government that is responsible.
The same argument Coe is making now is the exact same one advanced in 1980 to try to keep Britain out of Moscow — the Soviet army, at the direction of the Soviet government, invaded Afghanistan, therefore Soviet athletes ought to pay the price for what the Soviet government and army did.
Query: did anyone consult Soviet athletes about the battle plans of the Soviet army in December 1979?
Reality check: Britain really doesn’t like Russia. Recall that in 2022 Wimbledon banned Russian and Belarusian athletes from the tournament. Why? Concerns over having them there would “benefit the propaganda machine of the Russian regime.” When Coe says, as he does, that he is not neutral, who is he playing to? History? Or a more current set of constituencies? Including those that, in the United Kingdom in particular, and especially since the outbreak of the doping saga in 2014, have been virulently anti-Russian?
Here is Coe from 2014 — you can find him with similar comments, surely, from other periods in recent years — on one of the topics at hand, boycotts:
“They are absurd. They fly in the face of any sensible political judgment.
“Certainly at an Olympic level they have never remotely achieved what they set out to do other than penalize the competitor.”
Make it make sense. Please.