It’s official — Russia and Belarus won’t be invited to the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
The International Olympic Committee made the announcement Thursday in an update to an online post addressing the controversy over its push for Russians and Belarusians who haven’t supported the war against Ukraine to be allowed to compete as “neutral athletes.”
But whether or not those athletes are able to participate in next year’s Summer Games has yet to be decided, despite the national Olympic committees of Russia and Belarus not getting the formal invitations that will be sent later this month.
“The IOC will take this decision at the appropriate time, at its full discretion, and without being bound by the results of previous Olympic qualification competitions,” the update to the post reiterated.
According to the update, the IOC’s current recommendations “do not concern the participation of athletes and their support personnel with a Russian or Belarusian passport at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 or the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.”
Much of the rest of the update was reflected in a recent speech by IOC President Thomas Bach at a special session of the Switzerland-based organization called to deal with an unrelated sports federation issue.
Bach criticized Ukraine’s government for “depriving their own athletes from their chance to qualify for the Olympic Games Paris 2024 and to make the Ukrainian people proud” after some Ukrainian athletes were kept from events that included Russians or Belarusians.
The IOC president also defended the new policy that reverses a previous call for Russian and Belarusian athletes to be barred from international competition, issued after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 with assistance from neighboring Belarus.
Allowing participation by Russian and Belarusian athletes without flags or other emblems of their countries is described in the updated post as a “workable pathway forward,” embraced by the “vast majority of the Olympic movement stakeholders from across the globe.”
There are very vocal critics, however, especially in both Ukraine and Russia.
Ukraine’s government “insists on the ‘total isolation’ of all Russians and Belarusians,” the IOC post said, while Russian leaders consider the IOC’s “strict conditions to be unacceptable, humiliating and discriminatory.”
There has been talk by some Ukrainian officials of an Olympic boycott, and representatives of a number of countries, including the United States and Britain, have expressed their concerns about the new policy.
The mayor of Paris said earlier this year that any Russian athlete participation in the 2024 Olympics while the war against Ukraine continues would be “totally indecent,” but organizers of the Paris Games have acknowledged that’s up to the IOC.
Bach has labeled opposition to the IOC’s efforts “deplorable,” saying back in March that it “cannot be up to the governments to decide which athletes can participate in which competitions. This would be the end of world sport as we know it today.”
The only other national Olympic committee not receiving a formal invitation to the Paris Games is Guatemala. The IOC suspended the central American country’s Olympic committee last fall over alleged government interference.