In the midst of the debate over whether athletes from Russia and Belarus will be able to participate in international competitions again, something that they have been prohibited since the invasion of Ukraine, Piotr Ivanov resumed the presidency of the Russian Athletics Federation and assured that he will have a meeting with the managers of World Athletics.
Ivanov had been elected president of the Russian Athletics Federation in November 2020, but he had to leave office due to the two-year sanction that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) applied to senior officials in the country.
AMA banned officials from holding any responsible position in sports federations, Ivanov worked in the public administration and for this reason he had to step aside. Irina Priválova, the historic sprinter who had lost the election, took command on an interim basis.
“I congratulate Piotr Ivanov on his return to the position of president of the RAF,” said Oleg Matitsin, Minister of Sports, during the RAF congress. The return to office comes as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) debates whether Russian athletes will be able to compete again and under what condition they would do so (it would only be under strict neutrality).
“The meeting will take place with absolute certainty before March,” Ivanov said during the RAF congress. Of course, the invasion of Ukraine and the suspension of athletes is not the only problem that the president must solve, it is that the Russian Athletics Federation was excluded in 2015 after the scandal with state doping in national sports. In March of next year, precisely, the World Athletics Council will have a new report made by experts regarding the situation and if there was any progress in this regard.
Beyond this meeting announced by Ivanov for Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, “nothing has changed”. At the last Olympic Summit, it was mentioned that each Federation could be responsible for defining whether or not to accept Russian and Belarusian athletes and besides that he did not attend, the top leader of athletics later made his position clear in a talk with journalists.
“We are going to continue to protect the integrity of our sport. All athletes, as well as technical and management staff, are excluded from all events organized by World Athletics for the near future,” Coe explained and reiterated that the situation in Russia is even more complex due to the suspension it has faced since November 2015 when the implementation of an institutionalized doping system was verified.
Since the suspension in February 2022, Russian athletes expressed their dissatisfaction with not being able to compete and one of the most critical voices was that of Mariya Lasitskene, who was able to participate under the neutral flag in the Tokyo Olympic Games after the team was excluded in Rio 2016.
“In the last seven years, in about four years I haven’t had the chance to participate in international competitions, even though there were never any personal complaints against me. Except for one... the International Athletics Federation pulls my Russian passport out of its sleeve every chance it has,” the Olympic champion in high jumping wrote in a letter last June and stated that the suspension of the athletes “did not stop the war but triggered a new one, around sports, which is no longer impossible to stop.”
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