IOC calls on British govt to respect 'autonomy of sport'
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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy attends an online meeting with sport ministers of 35 countries to discuss a ban of Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Olympics.
PHOTO: REUTERS
LONDON – Olympic chiefs have urged the British government to respect the “autonomy of sport” after an attempt to lobby sponsors against a proposed pathway for Russian and Belarusian athletes to participate at the 2024 Paris Games.
Britain’s Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer last week wrote a letter to 13 of the biggest Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung and Visa, urging them to put pressure on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to abandon its proposal.
“It is not up to governments to decide which athletes can participate in which international competitions. This would be the end of world sport as we know it today,” the IOC said on Monday.
“We hope very much that the British government will respect the autonomy of sport. It must be the sole responsibility of sports organisations to decide which athletes can take part in international competitions based exclusively on their sporting merit.
“In accordance with this, Olympic sponsors are not involved in this decision-making process.”
Frazer, however, had a different view.
“We know sport and politics in Russia and Belarus are heavily intertwined, and we are determined that the regimes in Russia and Belarus must not be allowed to use sport for their propaganda purposes,” she wrote in her letter.
“As long as our concerns and the substantial lack of clarity and concrete detail on a workable ‘neutrality’ model are not addressed, we do not agree that Russian and Belarusian athletes should be allowed back into competition.”
The IOC issued sanctions against Russia and Belarus after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but is reluctant to exclude their athletes from the Olympics entirely for fear of a return to the boycotts of the Cold War era.
It set out a pathway in January for athletes from these countries to earn Olympic slots through Asian qualifying and to compete as neutrals in Paris. The next month, the British government issued a joint statement with 34 other nations reiterating a call on the IOC to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from its competitions.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has threatened to boycott the Paris Olympics if athletes from these two countries compete. REUTERS
