From where Andrew Parsons had been sitting the day before, he looked down from his podium again on Thursday, down at the journalists in Beijing’s Main Press Centre. He wasn’t wearing a tie this time. The night that lay behind him was quite obvious.
Around 20 hours had passed since the President of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) expressed the wish that the 13th Winter Games for people with disabilities should be about sport, not politics, at the start on Friday. Now he said: “The war was carried to these games. And then the situation escalated.”
The IPC’s decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in the Paralympics under a neutral flag, despite the war of aggression against Ukraine, lasted only a few hours. The criticism was overwhelming. After all, the IPC, of all things the World Disabled Sports Association, which promotes inclusion, belonged to that minority in international sport that did not sanction Russia’s invasion with the harshest of means.
The admission followed on Thursday. And what happened in the meantime is now part of sports history.
A “very large number” of committees, teams and athletes have threatened to boycott the Games, said Parsons, 45. Even “governments”, as IPC spokesman Craig Spence put it, have “behind the scenes” on the national committees affected. According to the statement, the situation in the athletes’ villages had “escalated and is no longer justifiable”.
What exactly the association meant by that remained vague: “We have no reports of incidents of aggression,” said Parsons. But the atmosphere is “very explosive”. Monoskier Anna-Lena Forster, who will carry the flag into the stadium for the 17-man German team on Friday together with biathlete Martin Fleig, reported on Russians who ran through the village “looking down”. Friedhelm Julius Beucher, President of the German Disabled Sports Association (DBS), spoke of Russian athletes who had shown solidarity with Vladimir Putin.
71 Russian athletes, twelve from Belarus, that’s how many should have originally started. Dominance, especially in the Nordic sports, would have been expected. Parsons apologized to the athletes: They are now victims of the actions of their governments.
Latvia’s wheelchair curlers were the first to be threatened with a boycott
How the reversal of the IPC came about can be deduced from various descriptions by those involved. After the war began, according to Germany’s Chef de Mission, Karl Quade, many national committees called for the exclusion of Belarus and Russia, and “not a single one” took a different position. When the IPC executive nevertheless wanted to let the athletes participate on Wednesday, several nations had criticized this as unacceptable; Beucher named Poland, France and Norway as examples. “There were letters, there were speeches,” Quade said. Germany and Austria drew up a joint position paper.
It was apparently the Latvian wheelchair curlers who were the first to announce a boycott of a game against Russia. The two teams are good friends, the national committee said when asked, but the decision was a statement against Russia’s invasion. According to the Latvians, they were followed by the Estonian team. The teams from Canada and Switzerland are also said to have asked what the sanctions would look like if they did not play against Russia. And the IPC suddenly saw a scenario arise where the games were in jeopardy.
For the German team, said Quade, a boycott was not an issue. Germany is not qualified in either wheelchair curling or para-ice hockey, the two team sports at the Paralympic Winter Games. But the choice of words of the German criticism was particularly clear; he was ashamed, Quade had said. “We were depressed and appalled,” said Beucher. “The standing together of many nations” has “provided for the urgently needed rethinking”. He praised the decision: “This is a strong sign of democracy within the Paralympic movement.”
Beucher, 75, formerly for the SPD in the Bundestag, had already shown solidarity with Ukraine at the Paralympics in Sochi in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and broke international law, declined an invitation to dinner from Putin and invited the Ukrainian team to the German house. Beucher reported that he met Valeri Sushkevich, President of the Ukrainian Paralympics Committee, on Thursday morning. And he said to him: “Friedhelm, a new situation has arisen.”
Excluded: Athletes from the Russian Paralympic Committee are no longer eligible to compete in Beijing.
(Photo: Thomas Lovelock/OIS/Handout/Reutes)
“Another blow” after “Russian and Belarusian bombs,” is how the Ukrainians criticized the first decision of the IPC executive on Wednesday. Sushkevich, 67, had demanded the exclusion from IPC President Parsons in a personal conversation. On Thursday, the Ukrainians followed Parsons with a press conference. And Sushkevich described the situation of the team, 20 athletes and nine guides for visually impaired athletes in emotional words. He called it a “miracle” that they were in Beijing. Many only narrowly escaped the bombs, he himself slept on the floor of a bus for days.
“The easiest way for us would have been not to go to the Paralympics. But we couldn’t give up,” he said. “For us it’s a matter of principle to be here, it’s a symbol that shows that Ukraine is alive.” Especially in cross-country skiing competitions, in the absence of Russia, Ukrainians are candidates for numerous medals.
Russia’s Paralympic Committee is considering legal action
Whether the Russians will actually stay away from the games still needs to be assessed by the International Sports Court Cas. Russia’s Paralympic Committee (RPC) criticized the decision as unfounded and illegal. And Sports Minister Oleg Matyzin, according to the Tass news agency, announced a lawsuit that the Cas should decide “before the opening ceremony”. Parsons had already given the reason on Wednesday that the courts would lift the exclusion. “The legal situation remains the same,” he said on Thursday.
According to experts like the Düsseldorf sports lawyer Paul Lambertz, the situation looks like this: Of course, Russia’s Paralympics Committee is not at war, but its athletes are synonymous with a country that has unleashed an aggression that violates international law. “It must be punishable, also for sport,” he says of the SZ. And that’s what the current statutes of the IPC are all about, he thinks – even if there is no passage there that states that a member association should be banned if its government breaks the Olympic truce. The IPC representatives had referred to this gap.
According to Lambertz, the IPC code of ethics names other offenses: physical and psychological violence, racism, and discrimination based on national, ethical or social origin. One can draw a clear first-right conclusion: “If racism is forbidden, a war of aggression must also be forbidden in any case,” says Lambertz. “So if a far more minor offense can lead to a sanction, then a plus definitely has to lead to it.”
Incidentally, the rules of the IPC also stipulate that political statements should not be made at the competition site. But the organizers’ desire to separate politics and sport is likely to continue to fail at these Paralympics. A heart in the colors of Ukraine, that’s what an athlete from the USA wore on her headband during training on Thursday.