A few days before the start of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, a WADA report suggested that the IOC exclude all Russian athletes from Rio de Janeiro competitions. That was the conclusion after a series of investigations that, for several years, spoke of different anomalies in the field of sports in that country with regard to the consumption of banned substances. Anomalies as serious as that of a state system dedicated to covering up hundreds of positive cases or the obstruction of investigations that were carried out in this regard were suggested.
Regardless of the degree of verisimilitude of the complaints, the IOC decided to leave it up to each Federation to decide whether or not to allow the presence of Russian athletes, even without their own flags or anthems. On the one hand, it must be remembered that the decisions of the WADA in this regard are not binding. On the other hand, even today there are Olympic people who are convinced that, because of how close to the start of the games announced in the report, there was some ill intention on the part of a member of the supervisory body and that the real loot was to destabilize the administration of President Thomas Bach. Clearly, if there was such an intention, the result was not what was sought.
Since then, the IOC has maintained its position, even though it established certain requirements in this regard, whether each sport decides in cases like this.
Today, the issue of doping has been left in the background. The issue revolves around the aggression of Russia and its Belarusian allies against Ukraine. But the autonomous decision-making scenario is the same as it was seven years ago.
So, we are faced with almost as many different decisions and as many nuances as federations participate in these tournaments.
For example, that of gymnastics, which has just confirmed that it will accept officers and athletes in all its formal competitions as long as they commit to fulfilling some commitments.
Or that of swimming, which today suffers from the significant absence of the Russian delegation in the artistic swimming events at the Fukuoka World Cup.
Or tennis, which has different logics depending on the body that is in charge of the tournament. Russia cannot play either the Davis Cup or the Billie Jean King Cup, but representatives of both countries compete, without flags, on the ATP and WTA circuits. However, those responsible for the Wimbledon tournament banned these presences in the 2022 edition -the entity was sanctioned by the ATP for such a measure- but it enabled them for the edition that just ended, as if the same invasion for which they were punished had ended.
With regard to tennis and the Russian and Belarusian influence: adding up both rankings, there are 22 tennis players of those origins among the top 100 in women’s and men’s.
And in the antipodes appears athletics. Faithful to its decision prior to Rio, today, any presence of athletes from those countries in any competition at any level has been banned again. There is, however, a lesson not learned when they were punished for doping. It is enough to mention Mariya Lasitskene, one of the best high jumpers in history. World champion in Beijing 2015, she was not allowed to compete in Brazil a year later. However, she did so a year later at the World Cup in London -she won again-; the then IAAF, now World Athletics, considered her one of the Russian athletes “clean” of substances. She repeated in Doha 2019 and retaliated by winning the Olympic title in Tokyo. Suddenly, for other reasons, Mariya must stop dreaming of Paris. Much less so with Budapest, home of the world cup next August.
Whether we like one case more than another, whether by little or by a lot, clearly something is going wrong. Not to mention federations that allow the athlete to be present in individual disciplines but have no way to accept those who play as a team.
Personally, I have my opinion on this. That not only is it not binding, but it is not even relevant. The problem is that, floating between arbitrariness and incoherence, the opinions of those who do decide don’t seem to be getting it right either.
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