The US should insist that Russian and Belarusian athletes be banned from the 2024 Olympics

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) needs to get off the sidelines on the question of whether Russian athletes will participate in the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. Instead, it appears the IOC is trying to have it both ways — a cowardly stance that will fool no one.

Russia’s revanchist invasion of Ukraine and the resulting death and destruction have no precedent in recent history and the Olympic movement’s response should be a principled and categorical rejection of any participation by the perpetrators.

President Biden made an inspiring pledge in his State of the Union address to have the U.S. work “for more freedom, more dignity and more peace, not just in Europe, but everywhere.” To fulfill that vision, his administration should rally participants in the Summit for Democracy in March to pressure the IOC to exclude athletes from Russia and Belarus.

So far, the IOC has imposed sanctions against Russian and Belarusian government officials and expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. But late last month, the IOC also provisionally announced that Russian and Belarusian athletes could attend the 2024 Olympics and the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, albeit under a neutral flag and without any “anthem, colors or any other identifications whatsoever of these countries being displayed at any sports event or meeting.”

“No athlete should be prevented from competing just because of their passport,” the IOC executive board said. Meanwhile, the head of the organizing committee for the Paris games, Tony Estanguet, has maintained, “The Olympics in Paris will be kind of a neutral zone, not involved in political issues.”

In fact, politics will suffuse the Olympics, as it often does, especially if the Russian military is still slaughtering Ukrainian civilians on a daily basis. And no observer will fail to understand that Russia, despite its brazen flouting of civilized norms, was permitted to field a large contingent of athletes whose victories would be duly celebrated at home as Russian achievements and cause for national pride. 

The Kremlin historically has used the Olympics as a tool of soft power and a lever of international prestige. During the Cold War, an explicit goal of the Soviet Union was to display international dominance through sports. As early as 1949, the USSR’s sports committee’s agenda was to “spread sport to every corner of the land, raise the level of skill and, on that basis, help Soviet athletes win world supremacy in major sports.” During the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, where it competed for the first time, the Soviet Union spent the modern-day whopping equivalent of $8.2 billion on sports equipment to face the challenge of competing against the U.S. — and finished second in the medal count.

This obsession with winning continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the point that Russian officials conspired in what the IOC eventually would conclude had been “systematic doping in previously unfathomable ways” — abuses “so severe they were without precedent in Olympics history.”

Ever the mild disciplinarian, however, the IOC banned Russia from participating in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea but allowed Russian athletes to compete “as individuals wearing a neutral uniform.” (The World Anti-Doping Agency later imposed a ban of its own on Russia’s official participation in international sporting events.)

Given the IOC’s recent hesitation to bar a country’s athletes from competing, you might think the Olympics had never actually gone that far. In fact, South Africa was banned for three decades because of its apartheid policies, and Japan and Germany were not welcome in 1948.  

To be sure, Olympic boycotts have a far more robust pedigree, with many examples over the years on behalf of a variety of causes. For example, several nations — although not the U.S. — boycotted the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne because of the Soviet invasion of Hungary.  

Soviet aggression also sparked the largest boycott, when the U.S. and more than 60 other countries boycotted the Moscow-hosted 1980 Olympics to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan the previous year. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies retaliated in 1984, boycotting the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

For that matter, in 2014, several leaders, including President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, boycotted the opening ceremony in Sochi, Russia, for a variety of issues involving human rights.    

So, the U.S. would be on well-trod ground if it insists that politics is indeed relevant in this extraordinary context and that the IOC must ban athletes from the national architect of the bloodiest land war in Europe since World War II, as well as its flunky, Belarus. Moreover, such a campaign would clearly secure a great deal of support. Sports ministers in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have warned that the IOC’s decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete could galvanize a major boycott of Paris; Polish minister Kamil Bortniczuk predicted up to 40 countries would back such a move. 

A meeting on Feb. 10 seemed to confirm his claim, when most of the 35 participating countries came out in support of excluding athletes from Russia and Belarus. Although the U.S. participated in the meeting, the Biden administration’s position remains ambiguous. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this month said the administration does not object to athletes from Russia or Belarus competing if it is “absolutely clear” they are not representing their home countries. And after the recent multi-nation meeting, the State Department issued a statement promising to consult the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee “on next steps.”

Meanwhile, there is debate in Russian media over whether Russia itself should boycott the Olympics, rather than allow its athletes to submit to allegedly humiliating conditions. But just as Russian athletes participated in the Olympics after the doping ban, they are likely to participate in 2024, too, unless the IOC is persuaded to bar them. And while nothing the IOC can do will change the course of events in Ukraine, at least a full-scale ban would signal that the international community is truly intent on defending democracy and treating Russia as the outlaw nation it has become. 

Ivana Stradner is a research fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Barish Center for Media Integrity, where her research focuses on Russia’s information operations and cybersecurity, particularly Russia’s use of advanced forms of hybrid warfare and the threat they pose to the West. Follow her on Twitter @ivanastradner.