Despite the war in Ukraine, athletes from Russia and Belarus will be treated to the biggest stage since their ban from world sport at the Asian Games in Hangzhou in September. At its general assembly in Bangkok, the Asian Olympic Council (OCA) decided to allow a total of 500 athletes from the two countries to take part in the spectacle in China.
According to the decision, Russians and Belarusians will compete in China as neutral athletes without any indication of their origin. All results of Russian and Belarusian athletes should only serve to protect their chances of participating in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris and are not taken into account in the medal table of the major event with a total of 10,000 active people.
No politicians and functionaries
The Association of National Olympic Committees in Asia did not provide any information on the criteria for inclusion in the contingent of “neutral athletes”. However, the Kuwaiti OCA director-general Husain al-Musallam stressed in Thailand’s capital that no politicians and officials from Russia and Belarus would be invited to Hangzhou for the games from September 23 to October 8.
The decision of the OCA delegates had been looming for several months. The decision to integrate Russia and its ally Belarus into the Asian Games was proposed by the OCA itself last December at the “Olympic Summit” of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne.
Bach: initiative is a “creative idea”
The initiative, prepared behind the scenes, paved the way for the re-admission of Russian and Belarusian individual athletes to international competitions after months of isolation. Accordingly, the German IOC boss Thomas Bach praised the OCA initiative as a “creative idea”. A few weeks later, at the beginning of spring, the head of the Rings organization issued the still highly controversial “recommendation” for the reintegration of Russian and Belarusian athletes into international sport.
The reactions of the international top associations of the Olympic sports varied. In Bach’s earlier sport of fencing, on the one hand, the world association FEI threw up the calendar for competitions in the Olympic qualification at short notice, while on the other hand, World Athletics still does not allow athletes from the two warmongering nations to compete because of the raging Ukraine war.
At the political level, sports ministers from many European countries have repeatedly called for Russia and Belarus to be excluded from next year’s summer games in the French capital.