Twelve days separate the extinguishing of the Olympic flame and the lighting of the Paralympic flame, Friday March 4, in Beijing. Twelve days during which the Olympic truce was shattered. By deciding, on the night of Wednesday February 23 to Thursday February 24, to invade Ukraine, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, caused the banishment of Russian and Belarusian sport, for its support for Moscow. The Paralympic Winter Games, which run until March 13, see the shadow of the conflict in Ukraine hovering over them.
Meeting urgently, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) – the organizer of the Games – condemned, in a press release posted on Wednesday March 2, “the breaking of the Olympic truce by the governments of Russia and Belarus”, who “could not go unpunished”. And announced that athletes from both countries could participate in the event but “under neutral banner”, without being counted in the medal table. Concretely, the Russian and Belarusian delegations will parade under the Paralympic flag during the opening ceremony and will be deprived of their national anthem – which was already the case for Russia at the Olympic Games since the institutionalized doping scandal that broke out after the Olympics. of Sochi in 2014. In addition, in case of victory, Russian and Belarusian athletes “will have to cover the symbols and flags of their countries on their equipment”.
Since the beginning of the week, the CIP was under pressure from many actors, sportsmen and politicians. On Monday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had, in an unprecedented decision, breaking with years of praising the apoliticism of sport, called on sports authorities to exclude Russia from their competitions. In the wake of the sanctions launched by the powerful football federations – the European confederation (UEFA) and, above all, the international federation (FIFA) – the whole of Russian sport found itself on the sidelines.
The “dilemma” of the organizers
The International Paralympic Committee is not a sub-chapel of the powerful IOC. And his decisions, sometimes, differ. “These two institutions do not operate in the same way, explains Patrick Clastres, historian of sport and Olympism and professor at the University of Lausanne. The IOC gives its instructions to the international federations, then relies on them to make decisions. For its part, the CIP does not have this “filter” of international federations – there is none in disabled sport – which changes the paradigm. » Thus, during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016, the IPC could not rely on the international federations recommending that they exclude Russian athletes, it took the decision to suspend the country from the Paralympic Games.
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