Russian athletes likely to be banned from 2024 Olympics, says IOC stalwart

The IOC faces having to ban Russian athletes from taking part at the Paris 2024 Olympics even under a neutral flag because qualification events for the Games will start in the next few weeks, it has been warned.

Craig Reedie, one of the most influential members of the Olympic movement over the past 30 years, said it is “unlikely” that athletes from Russia and Belarus will be able to participate in Paris after the IOC recommended that international federations ban them from competition completely following the invasion of Ukraine.

Of the Olympic sports, only cycling, tennis and judo have still permitted Russians and Belarusians to continue to compete but Reedie also doubts whether athletes in those sports would be allowed to qualify for Paris.

“It’s the next big issue. The problem is that roughly two years before the Games, the qualifying period starts as set by the international federations and the IOC,” Reedie, an honorary IOC member and former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), said.

“There’s a real issue at the moment for the federations who have a clear instruction which they’ve agreed to that they won’t invite Russians and Belarusians to take part in events. Therefore on the face of it now it’s unlikely that anybody would qualify other than in those three sports which don’t do it that way. Will they be able to qualify [from those three sports]? I’m not sure.

“A decision is going to have to be taken on what happens to each of these two countries, and my guess is that the general feeling would be that they should not qualify.

“Most people are struggling with how we could achieve some degree of representation, but at the moment, there is no clear way to do it. Therefore, you maintain the status quo.”

Reedie added that it would be unrealistic to allow Russians back into the qualifying competitions after they had started in the event of the war in Ukraine ending before 2024.

“It’s quite difficult halfway through to say, ‘All of you who have now qualified we’ve changed the rules’, he said.

Reedie said it is “unlikely” that athletes from Russia and Belarus will be able to participate in Paris

The IOC’s edict that Russians should not take part in international competition expires at the end of 2022, well after some qualifying competitions have started. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has already stated that Russians will not be welcome while the war continues.

Athletes from Russia competed under the banner of the Russian Olympic Committee at last year’s delayed Tokyo Games, after Wada banned Russia from all international sport for doping violations.

Reedie also expanded on a revelation in his new book Delivering London’s Olympic Dream, being published by Fonthill Media later this month, that a Russian secret service agent who carried out the Salisbury poisonings was also suspected of being behind the hacking of a Wada meeting in 2016.

“About a year later, five officers from the National Crime Agency descended on my house in Glasgow and crawled all over the PCs, iPads, phones and laptop to make sure I was clear,” he said. “They effectively told me that the people who did it [the hacking] had subsequently been followed on CCTV around the south of England and one of them was one of the two GRU thugs who was involved in the Skripal poisoning.

“I took a pretty instant dislike to the situation at that moment.”