THE FALLOUT OF RUSSIA'S INVASION IN THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS: THE GUARDIAN.

• Author: Ingle, Sean

Russia is both a geopolitical and an athletic power: formerly, the Soviet Union was an Olympic juggernaut, while Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. To analyze the impact the Russian invasion of Ukraine is having on the world of athletics, the Journal spoke with Sean Ingle, a journalist with The Guardian who has covered sports for over a decade. The conversation addresses the sporting world's response to the war, the tensions both within leagues and between athletes over Russian competitors, and the complex political nature of global sport in the 21st century.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Contemporary Russian aggression towards it neighbors now stretches back 15 years, to South Ossetia, Georgia, in 2008, and later to the invasion of Crimea in 2014, with ongoing hostilities in the eastern regions of Ukraine ever since. How has the response from the international sporting world in particular been different this time?

Sean Ingle (SI): Two things. First was the scale of Russia's invasion. I think the sporting world had perhaps looked away a little bit with the others, certainly with Georgia and later Crimea in 2014. The scale of the invasion, coming just days after the 2022 Winter Olympics, was far different than what we saw in 2008 and 2014. Second, I think the international response was different because of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Barely days after the war broke out, the IOC had this meeting of its executive board, which then released a statement that recommended no participation of Russia and by Russian athletes and officials in sport. It said that no international events should be staged in Russia and Belarus. It also said, "The IOC EB has, based on the exceptional circumstances of the situation and considering the extremely grave violation of the Olympic Truce and other violations of the Olympic Charter by the Russian government in the past, taken the ad hoc decision to withdraw the Olympic Order from all persons who currently have an important function in the government of the Russian Federation or other government-related high-ranking position...." (i) The list explicitly mentions three persons, including Vladimir Putin. That is the starting point.

What you have to realize is that almost all Olympic sports rely on the IOC for the majority of their funding. There are some exceptions: track and field is one, as well as sports like tennis, which obviously have their own circuit. But most of these, the smaller and mid-range Olympic sports, get a lot of monev from the IOC every four years. Therefore, they will be guided by an IOC directive on the whole. That's why things were very different this time around.

JIA: You said that the IOC held this meeting just a few days after the invasion. Did the IOC move that quickly, or was there some kind of knowledge in advance that the executive board might need to respond in a formal manner?

SI: There was an awful lot in the news about this. I was in Beijing for the Winter Olympics, (ii) and IOC President Thomas Bach was asked about it. The IOC makes a huge play about how they bring peace to the world. If you ever sit in on an IOC meeting, or ever listen to Thomas Bach or others talk, a lot of it is about how the central purpose, or one of the central tenants of the Olympics, is to bring nations together: nations that otherwise would fight and row and argue are brought together in sport. This was the message in Beijing. In the closing ceremony, Bach said the words, "Give peace a chance;" John Lennon's "Imagine" was played, as it always is, at the opening ceremony.

If you go back to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018, the IOC would have regarded that as a huge success, bringing North and South Korea together. You might remember there were some fears in 2017, even early 2018, that there were problems between the two countries. We all feared that there could be some serious stuff going on there. The IOC regarded those games as a diplomatic triumph.

Returning to the question, during those Winter Olympics, there was a lot of talk about fears of an invasion. They finished on Sunday, February 20. Almost immediately afterwards, the Russians invaded, on February 24. What was particularly tricky for the IOC was that the Winter Paralympic games were being staged in Beijing at the start of March--barely ten days or so afterwards. The IOC almost had to react so quickly because it had to make a quick decision on Russia and whether or not its athletes would be allowed to participate. The IOC ultimately decided, at that point, that the Russians would not compete in the Winter Paralympic games.

That, I believe, explains partly why the IOC moved so quickly. There was a lot of talk and chatter while we were in Beijing, but the fact that it happened in between the Winter Olympics and the Winter Paralympic games meant the IOC had to make a decision very quickly.

JIA: What about other governing bodies? Was the response as fast as that of the IOC?

SI: Most of the sporting bodies fell in line with the IOC, at least when it came to team sports. Moving forward to where we are now, some sports have made a separation with representation: if you are playing an individual sport, you can play under a neutral flag, and we see that in tennis. In chess-which, interestingly, is run by a Russian--they suspended Sergei Karjakin, who was a former World Chess Championship challenger, for 6 months because he made some sort of outlandish statements about supporting the Russian troops and some other things. But generally, most sports, I think, adopted the individual athletes plan and neutral flag. Almost every sport with a Russian team competing had to do it quite quickly.

UEFA, (iii) the governing...