Russian and Belarus athletes cleared to compete as neutrals at Paris Olympics

By James Toney

Russians and Belarusians will compete at next year's Olympics - but only as independent individual athletes and without flags or anthems.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has made no secret he didn't want to victimise athletes because of the decisions of their respective governments.

Russians haven't competed under their own flag at the Games since the 2016 Games in Rio.

Two years later in PyeongChang they lined up as 'Olympic Athletes from Russia' following the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee for their involvement in the institutionalised doping at the 2014 Games in Sochi.

And they competed under the ROC's emblem - after that organisation was reinstated - in Tokyo and Beijing but the invasion of Ukraine, during the Olympic Truce in February 2022, lead to an international ban across many sports.

"The Executive Board (EB) of the IOC has decided that Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) who have qualified through the existing qualification systems of the International Federations (IFs) on the field of play will be declared eligible to compete at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 in accordance with the conditions outlined below," read an IOC statement.

"Individual Neutral Athletes are athletes with a Russian or Belarusian passport. The protection of the rights of individual athletes to participate in competitions despite the suspension of their National Olympic Committee is a well-established practice, respecting human rights."

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal vowed earlier this year to boycott the Olympics, if Russians and Belarusians were allowed to compete.

How many do line up in the French capital remains a moot point, with athletes from both countries missing many of the qualifying events in the last two years, with the IOC confirming of the 4,600 athletes to have qualified, only eight are Russian and three from Belarus.

Ukrainian athletes have competed against Russians and Belarusians since the invasion on February 24th last year, with Marta Kostyuk booed after she refused to shake the hand of Aryna Sabalenka at this year's French Open at Roland Garros.

Four-time Olympic medallist Olga Kharlan was even disqualified for not shaking hands with Russian rival Anna Smirnova at this year's fencing World Championships, a breach of the sport's rules, but was later reinstated after an outcry forced the international federation to back track.

A Ukrainian boycott is considered unlikely - their athletes sat out the recent world championships in judo and taekwondo - because officials in Kyiv want the profile of their flag flying at the Games.

However, it's just over a year since the Russian Olympic Committee admitted regional sports organisations in the annexed territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.

And just a few weeks ago the Ukrainian government posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Russians interpretation of the Olympic ideals was 'not to win, but to take part ... of another country'.

For someone so innately political, Bach frets constantly about the impact of geopolitics on his beloved 'movement', rightly claiming there was no talk of a ban for the USA and allies when they invaded Iraq or Saudi Arabia for their bloody intervention in the Yemeni Civil War, just two of countless examples.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has already questioned Bach's bias after his organisation avoided the difficult questions to arose from the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

The Israel government wrote to Bach in October asking him to expel Palestinian Olympic Committee chairman Jibril Rajoub, in response there have also been vocal calls for Israel to have their place at the Games withdrawn.