The Russian Olympic Committee remains suspended from the Olympic movement. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has in fact rejected the appeal against the suspension of the Russian committee (ROC) decided in mid-October by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The announcement was made on Friday February 23 by the independent institution responsible for disputes in sport.
The IOC had taken its decision to sanction the placement under the authority of the ROC of four sports organizations in occupied Ukrainian regions, recalls the CAS in a press release.
The court based in Lausanne also indicates that its decision is, at its level, “final and binding” but that it can be appealed within thirty days to the Swiss Federal Court. On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the CAS believes that the IOC “did not undermine the principles of legality, equality, predictability and proportionality”.
Deprived of Olympic funding
On October 12, 2023, the IOC – meeting in Bombay for its 141e session – had shaken up his agenda to react to the “unilateral decision” taken a week earlier by the Russian Olympic Committee to annex the sports organizations of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia regions, located in eastern Ukraine and occupied by the Russian army. The IOC then argued that this initiative constituted a “violation of the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee”therefore of the Olympic Charter.
This measure by the IOC, now confirmed by the CAS, has the effect of depriving the ROC of Olympic funding. However, it has no impact on the presence of Russian and Belarusian athletes who did not support the invasion of Ukraine, under a neutral banner, at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, authorized at the beginning of December by the IOC.