After the exclusion of its athletes from the Paralympics in Beijing, Russia will organize its own sports festival for people with physical disabilities without further ado.
From March 16 to 21, up to 70 athletes will compete in cross-country skiing, biathlon, curling, snowboarding, alpine skiing and sledge ice hockey in Khanty-Mansiysk. Those six sports are also on the program in China.
The competitions are to be held “under the Russian state flag and to the sounds of the Russian national anthem,” said Sergey Artamonov, who is responsible for sports in the Yugra administrative region, according to the “TASS” news agency.
That’s exactly what the athletes were banned from doing in Beijing before being banned from the Games altogether over the Russian attack on Ukraine.
The event in Khanty-Mansiysk, where the Biathlon World Championships took place in 2003 and 2011, is called “We are together. Sport”. It was initially unclear whether Belarusian athletes would also take part.
71 athletes from the Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC) should have started in Beijing.