The International Olympic Committee has announced that it will greenlight a full return for Russian athletes at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, despite the fact that nothing much has changed with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The IOC declared that it was “provisionally” lifting the suspension of Russian athletes that had been in place since October 2023, under the flimsy pretense that the Russian Olympic Committee is no longer trying to control regional sports organizations in Ukrainian territory. Despite claiming that the IOC still opposes Russia’s attempts to conquer Ukraine, IOC President Kirsty Coventry claimed that it was hypocritical to ban Russia and not several African nations that are also conducting wars on their continent.
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In other words, the IOC’s defense of itself is that it is run by moralizing hypocrites who have no real standards.
We know that, which is part of the problem. The IOC shouldn’t disregard global politics and allow military expansionist regimes to send athletes to the Olympics, but at least being entirely apolitical would be a clear standard. That isn’t what the IOC does, though — the organization picks and chooses which global political issues it wants to partake in and which ones it doesn’t. For example, the IOC still refuses to acknowledge Taiwan’s existence, forcing the country to compete as “Chinese Taipei” at the behest of China, which hopes to militarily conquer it soon.
And, if the weak excuse of jurisdiction over regional sports is the only issue that the IOC wanted to see resolved, why did the committee allow some Russian athletes to participate in the 2024 Olympics under a made-up flag as “neutral” athletes? And why was Belarus included in the same ban against Russian athletes in the first place? Was Belarus also trying to control regional sports organizations in Ukrainian territory?
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It is hypocrisy all the way down, which has always been the case with the IOC. The organization is corrupt, run by egotistical bureaucrats who think they are God’s gift to the sporting world and who make political decisions on a whim one day and wail that they are an apolitical entity the next. There is no logic behind the decision to unban Russia, just as there was no logic behind allowing Russia to host numerous Olympic events in the years leading up to its (second) invasion of Ukraine, despite having proven it is a military expansionist regime.
Russia should remain banned, but that would require some level of moral consistency from an organization that has proven it only cares about money and the special privileges that come with slapping an Olympic logo on events that can be fully organized by its member nations without IOC involvement. The only Olympic tradition that has been proven over time is that the IOC will coddle the world’s most destructive, evil governments in pursuit of luxury lifestyles for IOC leaders.