Sawt Falasteen - 'Pariah': war leaves Russia shell of former self at Olympics

For over two decades under Vladimir Putin, Russia has sought to burnish its international prestige through sport, but the 2024 Summer Games will be seen as the lowest point in its Olympic history, with just a tiny squad of 15 neutral athletes representing Moscow.

In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the International Olympic Committee banned Russia from competing as a team. The few sportspeople allowed to come cannot wear Russian team colours and will have no anthem.

Russian television has no plans to broadcast the Games, which begin on Friday, in the first such blackout since the Soviet Union shunned the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

"Russia will be reduced to a shadow of itself at the Paris Games," said Jules Boykoff, a US-based academic who studies the Olympics.

"The journey from Olympic powerhouse to pariah has been swift and striking."

Ukraine's athletes have been told by their chiefs to avoid Russians in Paris as Moscow presses ahead with its offensive on the battlefield and kills civilians with aerial strikes.

Over 450 Ukrainian sportspeople have been killed as a result of the assault.

- 'Understatement of Olympian proportions' -

Moscow has been violating the Olympic protocol for years.

In 2008, Russia broke the Olympic truce by launching a short but bloody war against Georgia.

In 2016, Moscow's massive state-sponsored doping scheme came to light. According to a whistleblower, it involved agents of the FSB security service helping switch dirty urine samples at the Sochi Winter Games in 2014.

As punishment for Russia, its athletes competed in the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, the Tokyo Games in 2021 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 under a neutral flag.

In the absence of the Russian flag, the country's athletes still performed well.

Over 330 athletes from Russia competed in Tokyo, taking home 71 medals including 20 golds.

The Beijing Games were barely over when Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and the International Olympic Committee's patience finally snapped.

Athletes from Russia and its ally Belarus were banned from world sport, but the IOC has said Russian athletes can compete in Paris as long as they do not support the Kremlin's war against Ukraine or have any links to the army.

The Russian athletes will be excluded from the opening ceremony on the Seine.

Moscow says such moves are "unprecedented" discrimination and some of the sportspeople cleared by the IOC have turned down the chance to take part in Paris.

"To say that the relationship between the International Olympic Committee and Russia has deteriorated is to make an understatement of Olympian proportions," said Boykoff.

- 'Nothing to see' -

Just 15 Russians have accepted the invitation, seven of them tennis players including this year's men's Wimbledon semi-finalist Daniil Medvedev and 17-year-old sensation Mirra Andreeva.

The other eight will take part in cycling, swimming, canoe and trampoline competitions.

Russian wrestlers and judokas will boycott the event.

The Olympics have been a polarizing issue at home.

Some sports officials have called the athletes who are going to Paris "traitors" and a "team of bums", while others say they are "heroes."

Russia has said it wants to stage an alternative to the Olympics dubbed the Friendship Games, and not a single Russian TV channel said it would broadcast the action from Paris.

The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda said it had conducted a poll showing 87 percent of respondents were not interested in watching anyway.

"Without Russia these are not Olympics, so there's nothing to see there," the newspaper quoted one reader as saying.

Sports commentator Mikhail Polenov decried the "political" boycott.

"The fact that Russian TV channels will not show the Olympics is a national disaster," he told independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe.

Veteran sports commentator Alexander Shmurnov told AFP claims that Russians were not interested in Olympic broadcasts were "lies."

"A huge number of people in Russia would love to watch the Olympics," said Shmurnov, who quit state-controlled channel Match TV and left the country after the invasion. He said he would provide commentary of the Games on his YouTube channel.

He said many Russian athletes were "suffering" from growing isolation due to the Kremlin's politics.

"A majority of Russian sportspeople are not warriors of the propaganda forces," he said.

Global Rights Compliance, a Hague-based group, says two-thirds of the small group of Russian Olympians have expressed support for the war or had links to the military.

But Shmurnov said that, in current circumstances, even a Russian athlete's willingness to show up in Paris was nothing short of a positive "political act".

"Sport is the antithesis of war," he said. "Sport is peace."

X.Habash--SF-PST