Vladimir Putin shelves World Friendship Games meant to rival Olympics
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The International Olympic Committee had called the Friendship games a “cynical attempt to politicise sport” and called on countries not to participate.
PHOTO: ST FILE
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MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin has postponed until further notice the World Friendship Games, seen as Moscow’s alternative to the Olympic Games and originally meant to take place in 2024, according to a Kremlin decree published on Dec 2.
The competition – which is widely seen as Russia’s response to being banned from the Paris Olympics due its Ukraine offensive – were meant to take place in Yekaterinburg in September. But in the summer, the Games were postponed until an unspecified date in 2025.
The decree on Dec 2 said that the World Friendship Games were postponed “until a special decision” by the Russian president.
“In order to protect the right of athletes and sports organisations to free access to international sports activities, I hereby decree to postpone the holding of the World Friendship Games international competition until further instructions from the president of the Russian Federation,” the decree said.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had called the Friendship Games a “cynical attempt to politicise sport” and asked countries not to compete.
According to sports website insidethegames.biz, the Games had received applications from nearly 2,500 athletes from 127 countries to compete in 36 sports.
The director general of the organising committee Jerome Valcke, the French former secretary general of football’s world governing body Fifa, promised a “record-breaking tournament in terms of size and preparation time”.
Ukraine had previously said that Moscow wanted to use the event for “propaganda” purposes.
Russia, meanwhile, had accused the IOC of “neo-Nazism” for banning its athletes and those of its ally Belarus from competing under their national flags in Paris.
The country had in 2023 said it would bring back the Friendship Games held in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when some socialist countries had boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics after the US led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.
However, with the latest development, the future of the event remains uncertain as there is no clear schedule of when it will be held or whether the Russian government will eventually give the green light for it to go ahead. AFP
