The Russian Ski Federation has appealed to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) over the exclusion of its athletes from Olympic qualifying competitions. The CAS confirmed receipt of the appeal submitted on Wednesday on Thursday evening. The objection, which is specifically directed against a decision by the international ski association FIS, also comes from twelve Russian athletes and the Russian Paralympic Committee.
The Russian appeal before the CAS concerns an October FIS decision that Russian and Belarusian athletes are not allowed to compete as neutral individual athletes in FIS qualifying events for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) allows athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete as individual neutral athletes, as they did at the 2024 Paris Olympics, but leaves it to the international federations of the individual sports to decide whether to use this in their qualifying competitions. The FIS, the world association responsible for alpine skiing, ski jumping, cross-country skiing and Nordic combined, decided against it.
Ongoing war
The background to the sanctions against Russia and Belarus is the war of aggression against Ukraine that has been ongoing for more than three years. The IOC also suspended Russia’s Olympic Committee for including the four annexed Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia. The IOC viewed this as a violation of the Olympic Charter.