Whenever International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach says, and he has been obliged to say it again and again, that the IOC is trying its best to find a way for Russia and Belarus to be in the Paris Olympics next year, he acknowledges the pressure it is under not to do so.
That shows how thorny life at exalted levels can be. In a way, the world’s supreme sport bodies are suprasovereign powers given that any country playing up can be promptly given the bum’s rush. But when some of them get rebelliously together and raise Cain things go wrong. Even now, the antagonism in the affair is basically European but that hardly lessens the impact.
It is not just a lark, or a childish prank to rub an oldie up the wrong way. Not only has Bach run into civilly but firmly protesting critics in Germany, his own land supportive of him in the normal circumstances, but the mayor of the host city, Anne Hidalgo, has gone on record as saying that it would be terrible if Russia or Russians showed up for, or pranced about in, sport with bombs raining down on Kyiv.
She is not a far-Right maverick; she happens to be a politician with a Socialist identity card. There precisely lies the rub for the Establishment. The overwhelming majority of Europeans, regardless of their political inclinations, has taken Ukraine’s side in the conflict which Russia ignited. The appalling tragedies that have since taken place, coupled with Vladimir Putin’s stubborn refusal in the face of global disapproval to stop it have caused just the sort of hardening of attitudes which people across the world think could make a shambles of the Olympic Games just a year from now.
Putin seems to thumb his nose at a world desirous of an end not only to the hostilities but also the misery of Ukraine. Appeals have fallen flat, so Bach is gone and spoken to about it, as he had been a top-level sportsman before making the top perch in the IOC. When politicians fail them, civilians will look for alternative authority figures and, in this instance, it implies a fundamental, popular confidence in an erstwhile sporting icon, implicitly trusted to do the right thing by the aggrieved side. No disruptive or definite boycott threat has so far been voiced but several European nations have stopped only just short of it.
Poland, the Baltic states and Denmark stand by Kyiv, urging the IOC not to let Russia or Belarus in even as neutrals without flags or anthems, though Hidalgo does not mind Russian dissidents being there “under a refugee banner.” The pressure can only mount as the days pass and the war gets bloodier. Bach, of course, will have to cope with it but when the war is one part of the picture, juxtaposed with protests in so many places, the IOC will have an Olympian problem on its platter.