GENEVA –
Russian athletes who do not support their country’s war in Ukraine could be allowed back into international sport, IOC President Thomas Bach said in an interview published on Friday.
“It’s about getting athletes with Russian passports who don’t support the war back in competition,” Bach told Italian daily Corriere della Sera, adding, “We have to think about the future.”
Most sports followed recommendations by the International Olympic Committee in February, banning Russian teams and athletes from their events within days of the country’s military invasion of Ukraine.
As Russians begin to miss events that feed into qualifiers for the Paris 2024 Olympics, an exile stretching into next year could effectively turn into a broader ban on those games.
In an interview in Rome, Bach hinted at the IOC’s mindset after recent rounds of talks with Olympic stakeholders solicited opinions on Russia’s move back from pariah status.
“To be clear, it’s not necessarily about having Russia back,” he said. “On the other hand – and here comes our dilemma – this war was not started by the Russian athletes.”
Bach did not suggest how athletes could express opposition to the war when dissent and criticism of the Russian military were punishable by several years in prison.
Some Russian athletes publicly supported the war in March and are serving bans imposed on them by their sport’s governing body.
Olympic swimming gold medalist Evgeny Rylov performed at a pro-war rally attended by Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Gymnast Ivan Kuliak sported a pro-military “Z” symbol on his uniform at an international event.
According to media reports, in the current mobilization, former Russian international athletes are being drafted into military service. These include former heavyweight boxing champion Nikolai Valuev and soccer player Diniyar Bilyaletdinov.
Russians continued to compete as individuals in tennis and cycling throughout the war, without national symbols such as flags and anthems, even when teams were banned.
In athletics, Russians have only competed as federation-approved neutrals since 2015 because of the state-sponsored doping scandal that tainted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.
Bach and the IOC have been criticized in the aftermath of the scandal for not being tough enough on Russian athletes who have competed at every Olympics since 2016 with additional checks on their doping tests or as neutral without their national team name, flag and anthem.
Bach told Corriere della Sera it was the IOC’s mission to be politically neutral and “to have the Olympics and sport in general as something that still unites people and humanity”.
“For all these reasons, we are currently in a real dilemma with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” he suggested.
“We also need to see and study to monitor how and when we can return to fulfill our mission of having everyone back again, in whatever format.”
Bach was also in Rome for a sports forum hosted by the Vatican, where Pope Francis praised sport as “an educational and social good and it must remain so.”
“We should work to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to practice sport,” said the Pope, “to cultivate the values of sport – one could say to be ‘trained’ in them – and transform them into virtues.”
Vatican officials have previously said they would like to field an IOC-recognized team at the Olympics one day.
Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.