If Moscow continues its conflict with Ukraine, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo says no Russian delegation should be allowed to compete in the Olympics in Paris in the coming year.
Hidalgo had previously stated that Russian opponents might participate under a neutral flag, but in an interview with French media France Data on Tuesday, she backtracked.
Acknowledging that the closing choice belongs to the Worldwide Olympic Committee, Hidalgo mentioned she needs Russian athletes who will probably be banned “so long as there may be this conflict, this Russian aggression on Ukraine.”
“It’s not doable to parade as if nothing had occurred, to have a delegation that involves Paris while the bombs proceed to rain down on Ukraine.”
Hidalgo’s comments come after Ukraine’s sports minister renewed a threat to boycott the games if Russia and Belarus are allowed to compete, and said Kyiv would encourage others to join.
So far, no country has declared a boycott of the 2024 summer video game season.However, Ukraine gained help from Poland, the Baltic nations, and Denmark, which pushed again in opposition to an IOC plan to permit delegations from Russia and ally Belarus to compete in Paris as “impartial athletes” without flags or anthems.
Hidalgo mentioned she would discover it “completely indecent” if Russian athletes competed within the French capital under these phrases. However, she left the door open for Russian dissidents who don’t support President Vladimir Putin’s actions to parade in Paris “under a refugee banner.”
Russia has cautiously welcomed the IOC’s choice to present it a path to the Olympics, but calls for it to drop a situation that would exclude these athletes deemed to be “actively supporting the conflict in Ukraine.”
Russian Olympic Committee head Stanislav Pozdnyakov, who was a teammate of Ukraine’s Huttsait at the 1992 Olympics, referred to that side as discriminatory. The IOC, which beforehand advisable excluding Russia and Belarus from world sports activities on security grounds, now argues it cannot discriminate against them purely and primarily based on citizenship.
Requested by The Related Press concerning the boycott threats and the IOC plan, Paris 2024 organising committee head Tony Estanguet mentioned he wouldn’t comment “about political choices.”
If the IOC proposal takes effect, Paris could be the fourth straight Olympics where Russian athletes have competed without the national flag or anthem. The Russian groups at the Winter Olympics in 2018 and 2022 and the Summer Olympics in 2021 have been caught up in the fallout from state-sponsored doping.
The last time a number of international locations boycotted an Olympics was in 1988, when North Korea and others refused to attend the Summer Video Games in South Korea.
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