Facing scandal, Russia’s Summer Olympic Paris team is small : NPR

PARIS — Three years ago, more than 330 Russian athletes arrived in Tokyo for the last Summer Games. It was a powerhouse contingent that managed to score 71 Olympic medals in Tokyo.

This year in Paris, International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials say Russia will field scarcely more than a dozen athletes.

“We have 15 [athletes] with Russian passports,” said Kit McConnell, the IOC’s sport director, who added that the number who actually compete may change.

McConnell noted that Russian athletes will compete in only 10 sports disciplines, down from 30 just a few years ago.

The dramatic decline in Russia’s involvement in the Olympic movement follows years of doping scandals that began in 2014, heightened by international condemnation that followed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Ahead of the Paris Games, the IOC invited dozens of Russian athletes to compete but only as neutrals.

They would not be allowed to fly the Russian flag or play their country’s national anthem.

IOC rules also banned any Russian athletes who are “actively supporting” the invasion of Ukraine, or who have served in Russia’s military.

Russian officials balked at those limitations, describing them as “unacceptable.”

In a statement issued last month, Russia’s national judo federation said its athletes would decline to compete.

“Until the very end, we had hoped that common sense and a desire to hold full-fledged Olympic Games with athletes from Russia and Belarus would prevail over political intrigues,” the statement said.

Russia’s weightlifting federation also issued a statement saying its athletes would not compete, despite qualifying for the Paris Games.

This is the smallest Russian involvement in the Summer Olympics since 1984, when Moscow boycotted the Los Angeles Games entirely.

Belarus, one of Russia’s closest allies, will also send far fewer athletes to Paris, down from 101 in 2021 to just 17 this summer.

Olympic powerhouse to global pariah

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, once used the Olympic movement to burnish his country’s reputation, hosting the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. Plagued by doping scandals and accusations of war crimes, Russia and its athletes play a dwindling role in world sport.

Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

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Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

Russia’s role in the Olympic movement peaked in 2014, when President Vladimir Putin proudly welcomed the world to Sochi for the Winter Games.

Putin’s government spent tens of billions of dollars hosting the Games, which were designed to showcase Russia’s progress after the fall of the Soviet Union.

At the time, Russia was also a major financial sponsor of the IOC.

But in the months following the Sochi Games, journalists uncovered a deeply entrenched Russian doping system.

Investigators described the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs as an “institutional conspiracy” involving more than 1,000 athletes.

In 2017, Russia was suspended from the Olympics by the IOC.

That means Russian athletes can only compete as “individual neutral athletes,” without flying the Russian flag or playing the national anthem.

At the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Russia suffered another black eye when it was revealed star figure skater Kamila Valieva had tested positive for a performance enhancing drug.

Last year, the IOC took a further step to punish Moscow, banning the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) from all international sports activities.

That move followed the ROC’s decision to absorb sports clubs in regions of eastern Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — occupied by Russia’s invading army.

Last week, a human rights group called Global Rights Compliance issued a report suggesting that as many as two-thirds of Russian athletes who qualified for the Paris Games had violated the IOC’s neutrality rules by supporting the Ukraine war.

“The IOC is turning a blind eye to the involvement of Russian and Belarusian athletes who have demonstrated their support for Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” said Wayne Jordash, the organization’s president.

It’s unclear, however, how many of the 57 Russian and Belarussian athletes named in the report will actually compete in Paris.