The International Olympic Committee on Tuesday lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee, a move that makes it all the more likely — probable — a full Russian team will compete at the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Games.
Under Kirsty Coventry, IOC president for a year now, the organization has emphasized the basics — if you will, back to what our 21st century world might simply call the organization’s default settings. Her predecessor, Thomas Bach, proved himself a world-class politician who met early, late and often with global leaders. Coventry has yet to, just one example, take a formal meeting with Donald Trump. With Coventry, the focus is on sport, not politics or politicians. On athletes, not nations.
Thus the decision Tuesday was inevitable.
It says here it was also appropriate — and way past overdue, the key step in correction of a series of IOC actions taken after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that have constructively achieved, what?
Absolutely nothing.
IOC president Kirsty Coventry at Tuesday’s news conference // IOC YouTube screengrab
“We made it clear that we wanted to ensure all athletes have the possibility to compete at the Olympic Games,” Coventry said amid a Zoom news conference, “and not be held responsible for their government’s actions, and I believe that this is what this decision speaks to.
“It allows for Russian athletes to take part in sport competitions, but we’ve also been very clear that we do not condone any violence [nor] war around the world, and we will continue with that stance.”
The U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games should have made clear, once and for all, that singling out athletes for what their governments do, or not, does not work.
It serves only to punish the athletes while having little to no impact in effecting policy change, particularly in time of war.
This, though, is a lesson that apparently needs to be learned and re-learned generation after generation.
To that end, this space has been one of the only outlets in the western world, if perhaps the only one, to consistently contend the Russians — as Russians, uniform, flag, anthem — belong at the Games.
Now, again:
— The war in Ukraine is regrettable beyond words, on so many levels, and the devout wish is that the violence ends immediately if not sooner.
— It is by no means the only conflict on Planet Earth.
— Many other countries, including the United States, are even now engaged in military operations. No one is remotely suggesting the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee ought to be suspended, or the American team precluded from the Games. It has only been Russia. This speaks to a Eurocentric view of the world — which, for a global entity is, at best, problematic. It also speaks.to a double standard and, moreover, reeks of hypocrisy.
Amid the Milano-Cortina Games, from the official X/Twitter account of the United States Secretary of the Air Force
— More double standard and hypocrisy: every nation uses its athletes’ achievements at an Olympics to boast about how great they are and it is. To suggest the Russians are singularly engaged in “propaganda” belies the facts. The Americans did it at the Milano-Cortina 2026 Games. The French, too. Even, especially, those athletes with a military connection. The evidence is plain.
— Is there a reasonable-person argument that the Russians have brought this on themselves? War. Doping. More. Yes, yes and yes. Still, they belong. Why?
— The IOC’s mission is to bring the young people of the world together at the Games. There they can mix, mingle and internalize that we are all much more alike than different. All the athletes of the world means all — you can’t pick and choose who you like to be at the party and, in fact, if you only invite to the party those you like, and not those with whom you might or do disagree, then there’s no chance, none, of learning from and with each other. As the addition to the IOC motto says: together.
“There is still significant work to be done on the implementation of IOC decisions in international organizations,” Mikhail Degtyarev, the Russian sports minister and ROC president, said Tuesday on his Telegram channel.
“However, the IOC sends a clear signal — the Olympic movement must be beyond politics.”
Umar Kremlev, the Russian president of the International Boxing Association — Bach’s disfavor with Kremlev led the IOC to banish the IBA in 2023 — said Tuesday in a statement:
“This decision marks the exact outcome the IBA consistently predicted. When the IBA became the first international federation not to impose the ban of Russian and Belarusian athletes—fully following their right to compete under their national flags and anthems, the global sporting community watched with skepticism.
“Yet, the IBA stated clearly from the beginning that the rest of the sporting world, including the IOC, would eventually have no choice but to follow boxing’s lead. Today’s announcement proves that prediction entirely correct.”
The statement added, “Russian athletes must fully return to the world stage: under their flag, under their anthem, for their country,” issues that remain to be assessed — more probably, worked out — in the coming months, the release adding, “For an athlete, the flag and anthem are their heart and soul.”
As ever, the devil is in the details, and it remains unclear how this can and will work out with certain international federations — who, as a reminder, run the sports at every Olympics, not the IOC. Before Tuesday’s Zoom with reporters, the IOC held a call with the international federations to explain what it was doing, and why.
World Athletics just last week affirmed it would maintain a Russian and Belarussian ban that dates to March 2022. World Aquatics, meantime, decided in April that the Russians and Belarussians could be back — with uniforms, flags and anthems — and issued a statement Tuesday in support of the IOC decision.
World Aquatics president Husain Al Musallam said, “We remain as determined as ever to ensure that water remains a place where we can be united in peaceful competition and World Aquatics welcomes today’s decision by the IOC.”
Asked in the news conference if she was concerned Tuesday’s move might lead to a “patchwork” of eligibility rules at LA28, Coventry said, “No, we don’t foresee there being any patchwork.”
Meantime, it was 100% clear after its annual assembly, held two weeks ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, that what the IOC did Tuesday — ending the ROC suspension — was where things were headed.
The only question was when. Correction: how soon. The calendar says the Youth Games are coming up in Dakar, Senegal, this fall. Qualification events for the LA28 Games are due in short order.
Last September, the International Paralympic Committee reinstated Russia and Belarus.
In May, the IOC had given Belarus the OK to come back.
Then, at the assembly, the members approved a slew of changes, one of which added this new line to the Olympic Charter: “The IOC’s role is … to apply neutrality at all times, free from governmental, cultural, societal or economic pressure.”
As this space has noted repeatedly, the IOC speaks in code.
Under Juan Antonio Samaranch Bach, IOC president from 1980-2001; Jacques Rogge, 2001-13; Bach; and, now, still, Coventry.
The code here was not the added language. The sentence says what it says.
The code is who Coventry assigned to lead the internal working group that for the past year had workshopped the idea of how best to, as the IOC would put it in a news release, “prevent the instrumentalization of sport and athletes for political, societal or economic purposes,” and who then led the discussion at the assembly on this point:
Britain’s Sir Hugh Robertson, IOC member only since 2024.
Robertson is a former British army officer who saw active service in, among other conflicts, the 1991 Gulf War. He went on to serve as Olympics minister for the London 2012 Games and, after that, for nine years, chair of the British Olympic Association.
Since 2022, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, the intense focus seemingly everywhere in Europe has been Russia, Russia, Russia.
All the more so in the United Kingdom, where the war can typically be presented as an existential morality play: Russia evil, Ukraine heroic, no shades of gray, only black and white.
The British media has played a vigorous role in perpetuating this dynamic. The first quote in Tuesday’s story in The Times, reporting on the IOC decision, was, appropriately, Coventry. Immediately thereafter came a quote from a former government minister who said he was “totally opposed to the readmission of Russian athletes.”
Sir Hugh Robertson at the IOC assembly in June // IOC YouTube screengrab
It’s against this steady beat that the code reveals itself: the symbolism of what Robertson did and was there to do — a Brit, of all things, making plain the change in direction.
And not just any Brit. As Duncan Mackay reported anew recently at his Zeus Files newsletter, shortly after the Russian invasion Robertson said, “Sport is disproportionately important to absolutist regimes. The potential inability to compete would hit Russia hard.”
Robertson began his remarks to the IOC assembly by noting a United Nations study showing that 2025 recorded the “highest ever number of conflicts,” 65 — repeat, 65 — since records began, in 1946. For this purpose, he explained, a “conflict” means at least one state-based belligerent and at least 25 deaths.
Certain Olympic principles and rules, particularly on the notions of neutrality and athletes’ right to “access sport,” he said, needed to be “reinforced.”
He said, “The aim [is] to ensure that sport and the Olympic Games remain neutral and autonomous from politics, and can uphold their mission to unite the world in peaceful competition.”
Or, as Coventry said at Tuesday’s news conference, as plain as can be, “We don’t want to hold athletes accountable for the actions of their governments.”