Palestinian athletes should be “six to eight” at the Paris Olympics, where the International Olympic Committee will invite them if they fail to qualify, its president Thomas Bach said on Friday in an exclusive interview with AFP. “We have made a clear commitment that, if no athlete qualifies on the field, the Palestinian National Olympic Committee (NOC) will benefit from invitations,” announced the leader. Asked about the scale of these invitations, he then estimated the number of Palestinian representatives at “six or eight” in Paris depending on the result of the qualifications, “which are still in progress in a certain number of disciplines”.
The Olympic invitation system is not reserved for Palestinians but for any NOC that fails to qualify athletes, in the name of “Olympic universality” making it possible to bring together all nations, beyond just the elite. athletic. But the arrival of Palestinian athletes in Paris remained a major question since the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, following the attack launched by Hamas on October 7, notably destroyed most of the sports infrastructure.
International efforts to rebuild destroyed facilities
Thomas Bach received the president of the Palestinian NOC, Jibril Rajoub, last week in Lausanne, promising to continue the IOC’s support for the athletes, but also to ensure the coordination of international efforts to rebuild the destroyed installations.
If the head of Olympism called from the start of the conflict between Israel and Hamas for “a peaceful solution”, he also adopted a treatment very different from that of the Russian war in Ukraine, which resulted in a series of sanctions against Russian sport.
The IOC is hiding behind its “two-state solution”, since the Israeli and Palestinian NOCs have coexisted since 1995, a legacy of the Oslo peace process. Furthermore, “there has been no violation of the Olympic Charter, neither by the Israeli committee nor by the Palestinian committee”, insisted Thomas Bach on Friday, while the Russian NOC had placed regional sports organizations under its control. occupied Ukrainians.