Ukraine blasts IOC official’s ‘outrageous’ Russia comments
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Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr is one of the seven candidates vying to succeed current IOC leader Thomas Bach.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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KYIV – Ukraine on Oct 1 blasted a top International Olympic Committee (IOC) figure for suggesting Russia could be quickly readmitted to the organisation, if it starts obeying the rules.
IOC vice-president Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr said last week that Russia was in “clear and flagrant breach of the Olympic Charter”, but added: “The minute the reasons for suspension and non-recognition disappear, we have the obligation to start working very hard to bring them back.”
Ukrainian Sports Minister Matviy Bidnyi told AFP the “entire Ukrainian sports community was very surprised, very outraged” by the comments.
He invited Samaranch to visit Ukraine to “see the destroyed sports facilities” and talk to “athletes whose parents and relatives were killed as a result of Russian armed aggression”.
In a joint-statement with Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, Bidnyi said taking such a position was “incompatible with aspiring to lead the International Olympic Committee”.
Samaranch, whose father was IOC president from 1980 to 2001, is one of the seven candidates vying to succeed current IOC leader Thomas Bach.
Bidnyi and Sybiha added: “The suggestions of a possible return of Russian athletes to the international sports community are categorically unacceptable and outrageous.”
Samaranch had said Russia was in breach of the Olympic Charter “by taking over responsibilities of a fellow national Olympic committee in certain territories” – a reference to Moscow occupying and claiming to have annexed parts of eastern and southern Ukraine.
But it also was not the IOC’s job to take sides in political matters, he said last week: “If we start taking part as an organisation, saying ‘this country’s human rights record I don’t like’ or ‘this other country is guilty in this war’, we will disappear and the Olympic Games will disappear with the good that it does.”
The IOC excluded the Russian Olympic Committee after it had placed several sports organisations from occupied Ukrainian regions under its authority.
A tiny squad of 15 neutral athletes represented Russia at the Paris Olympics this summer. AFP
