Belated miracles or epic rescue acts not having been budgeted for anywhere, next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris could send the quadrennial showpiece event inching back to a split, a fate it has avoided since Seoul 1988 when America and Russia were back in together after Moscow in 1980 had been boycotted by the West over the invasion of Afghanistan and Los Angeles, four years later, by pro-Soviet countries.
The Paris Games kick off on 26 July but Vladimir Putin, whose Ukraine war has rubbed most countries up the wrong way, has ordered for an inaugural edition of the BRICS Games, fixed for June 2024, which implies that the Russians are cocking a snook at the International Olympic Committee. The IOC, having quite painstakingly looked like connecting the dots for the show in Paris, found itself at a loss as the martial exchanges in Ukraine and their collateral damage monopolised the world’s attention.
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When Russia, with the war going on, poked its nose into the affairs of the Olympic associations of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia in Ukraine in a startling act of hegemonic self-assertion, shocking all and sundry, the IOC had no alternative to suspending its membership of the global institution. Putin, of course, was not exactly tickled pink. The suspension meant Moscow could no longer use either the Russian Olympic Committee’s name or the Olympic rings in anything it attempted, the bar coming on top of prohibitory orders, announced earlier, restricting its athletes to participating in events as neutrals whose eligibility was contingent upon their complete dissociation from the military efforts in Ukraine.
An official denial of the use of the rings and of the name of a country’s Olympic committee pulls the rug from under the feet of a team, knocking the moral stuffing out of the national institution quite apart from dealing a major financial blow. An angry Putin subsequently harrumphed, fuelling a worldwide controversy, that the Olympic Charter was now out-dated and entirely bereft of its universal character. Politics, rather than sport, clinched invitations to the Games, and pressure was being put on Russia for conformity to a line of political thinking.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Russian tirade seems naively to bypass the war in Ukraine and a near-universal rejection of Putin’s acts of aggression, touching off the suspicion that Russia and Belarus are creating “a paradigm” according to which they will skip Paris 2024 as they will be “without a uniform, flag and an anthem”. Hence, the BRICS Games. Russia, of course, will continue to repudiate the inference but the cat is out of the bag. How India composes its reaction and decides what to do will be our chief concern but saying no to the Olympics is hardly an option. How the IOC decides to cope with the BRICS Games will also be something eagerly to watch out for since chances crop up where absences occur. India won the hockey gold in Moscow
