Passing conditions: admission of Russians to foreign starts becomes easier

The last few days and weeks have brought quite a lot of news about the admission of our athletes to international starts. The conditions for obtaining neutral status have been simplified in aquatics, wrestling, taekwondo and modern pentathlon, allowing dozens of our athletes a chance to qualify for major starts. Similar plans have been announced in weightlifting, and ski mountaineering has lifted its total ban on Russian athletes being the first of the Winter Olympic sports to do so. Does all this mean that the ice is broken and the good old days when there were no political barriers in world sport will soon return? Alas, there is a huge spoonful of tar in the process that has begun: the IOC representatives say that they do not intend to return the flag to Russia in the foreseeable future, which means that sanctions can be tightened at any moment.

Refusal of demarches

Evgenia Chikunova, Yulia Efimova, Ilya Borodin and 25 other Russian swimmers received neutral statuses without any problems and entered the Short Course Swimming Championships, which will be held from December 10 to 15 in Budapest. This will be the first major competition involving our "watermen" in almost three years (unless you count Evgeny Somov's performance at the 2024 Games). At the end of the Olympic season, many strong foreigners went on early vacation, so the chances of Russian neutrals bringing some medals from Hungary are very high. Actually, the total ban was lifted from Russians to World Aquatics competitions more than a year ago, but earlier our sports authorities considered that the conditions of admission were unacceptable.

Now the position of the leadership of our sport has changed, although we did not wait for fundamental concessions. For example, swimmers are still forbidden to perform with national symbols, are not allowed to communicate with the media, and the illegal and humiliating digging in social networks to identify "political red tape" has not been canceled. Some of our champions (for example, Kliment Kolesnikov and Evgeny Rylov) still refuse to start under sanctions.

Nevertheless, the general trend is to abandon demarches in relations with international sports organizations and move forward in small steps. And these steps, it must be admitted, are there. Thus, on Wednesday, December 4, the head of the IWF Mohammed Jalud announced the imminent return of Russian weightlifters to international tournaments.

- On the one hand, I am happy that our athletes may get a chance to compete again, but in this situation it upsets me that we will be allowed only in neutral status," Svetlana Zhurova, Olympic champion and State Duma deputy, told Izvestia. - I think this will be the case until a peace agreement is reached with Ukraine.

And the International Ski Mountaineering Federation (ISMF) was the first among the representatives of winter sports to admit our athletes to its World Cup. Pavel Shabalin, the head coach of the Russian national ski mountaineering team, said the day before that five of his wards - Nikita Filippov, Pavel Yakimov, Andrey Fedorov, Daria Zinchenko and Varvara Prokhorova - were granted neutral status.

- They were checked before giving licenses: we looked at their publications, their relationship to law enforcement agencies, sources of funding," TASS quoted Shabalin as saying. - Did they sign declarations? Yes, but there was not a word in them about renunciation [of the country], no one forced to condemn the SVO, nothing like that is there. The text is quite neutral.

This admission is very important in terms of the fight for Olympic quotas on the eve of Milan-2026, because the rest of our "winter athletes" have not yet been admitted and risk being left out of the Games, even if the green light is eventually given to the Russians.

A tangle of sanctions

Admission to the upcoming Winter Games is a new frontier in Russia's relationship with the IOC, for the sake of which the level of confrontation and mutual recriminations has now been sharply reduced. However, no decision has been made yet - everyone is waiting for the election of a new leader of the Olympic movement, scheduled for March 2025. It is the new IOC boss who will have to deal with an incredibly confusing situation from the legal point of view, which Thomas Bach and his team created by disqualifying Russia for "violating the territorial integrity of the UkrainianNOC".

If our country retains its membership in most international federations and admission to big starts (under the flag or not) is a technical issue, then everything is much more complicated with the Olympics. From the point of view of the IOC, the Russian national team simply does not exist at the moment, and individual neutral athletes are defenseless in the face of officials. Any restrictions can be invented with regard to them, they can be suspended at any moment, visas can be withheld, the sporting principle can be ignored. In the current situation, the decision on admission to Milan-2026 depends solely on the goodwill of officials from Lausanne, who can either favor the Russian neutrals or lower the barrier in front of them without any consequences for themselves.

We can fill ourselves with illusions that world sport has missed Russia and is ready to banish politics from itself; we can present our agreement to the long-known conditions of admission as a certain breakthrough in relations with the international community, as is being done now in weightlifting... But we must be clear: until the Russians return to the Olympic family in full, any surprises are possible - both pleasant and not so pleasant.

The fact that someone is questioning our right to compete under our own flag and to compete for Olympic quotas on a common basis is not normal. And, unfortunately, it is impossible to get out of these networks through a strategy of small steps. The tangle of sporting and cultural sanctions can only be cut, and this requires a political decision, for example by the new leadership of the IOC.