Russian, Belarusian athletes not part of opening ceremony

Agencies
Lausanne
Russians and Belarusians will not take part in the parade of athletes at the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics in July, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Tuesday.
The athletes from these countries who qualify for the Games will be competing as independents without their flags and anthems following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The opening ceremony in Paris will not be held in a stadium but will be staged on the river Seine with teams floating past an estimated 300,000 spectators.
The Russians and Belarusians, who will be competing as individual neutral athletes (AINs) under a specially-created flag and with an anthem without lyrics produced by the IOC, will not be part of that parade.
“They will not participate in the parade of delegations during the opening ceremony, since they are individual athletes,” the Olympic body said following an executive board meeting. But it said they would be experiencing all other parts of the opening ceremony apart from the team parade.
“This decision is the logical consequence of the fact that the athletes with Russian and Belarusian passports are not selected as delegations but as individual athletes,” Paris 2024 Games organisers said in a statement following the IOC decision.
The IOC said those athletes who do qualify will then be vetted by a three-member IOC panel in order to meet the eligibility criteria that the Olympic body established for Russians and Belarusians. The panel is headed by IOC Vice-President Nicole Hoevertsz and includes ex-NBA basketball champion Pau Gasol and South Korean former Olympic table tennis champion Ryu Seung-min.
Athletes who actively support the war, which Moscow calls a “special military operation”, or are contracted to the military or security agencies will not be allowed to take part.
The IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in October for recognising regional Olympic councils for Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Earlier on Tuesday the IOC criticised Russia’s plans to host their own ‘Friendship Games‘ later in 2024, saying it was politicising sport and violating the Olympic Charter.
Announced several months ago, the first edition of the Summer Friendship Games is “planned to be held in Moscow and Yekaterinburg” next September, the IOC said, with the first winter edition to take place in 2026 in Sochi, venue for the highly controversial 2014 Winter Olympics.
These two initiatives are in addition to the recent Games of the Future in Kazan, which combined traditional disciplines and e-sport, and the BRICS Games which take place in the same city in June.
Russian authorities claim that “athletes from more than 50 countries” will take part in the latter. The IOC is not criticising the Russians for creating multi-sport competitions outside its aegis since several already exist, including the Commonwealth Games and the Jeux de la Francophonie, but for doing so via a “very
intensive diplomatic offensive” through direct contacts with governments around the world.
“To make their purely political motivation even more obvious, they are deliberately circumventing the sports organisations in their target countries,” said the IOC statement.
“This is a blatant violation of the Olympic Charter and an infringement of the various UN resolutions at the same time.
“It is a cynical attempt by the Russian Federation to politicise sport.”