Russialess Games
Why it's vitally important to keep our sports Putin-free
Early in 2010, as I was packing my bag for Vancouver to cover the Olympic Winter Games for Sport-Express, a Russian national sports daily that employed me as their full-time foreign correspondent in North America, I wrote a short blog post about my upcoming assignment. A short and, as I naively thought, a relatively uncontroversial blog post.
In it, I informed by Russian audience that I wasn’t going to Vancouver as a fan of the Russian Olympic team. That my job was that of a reporter, not a supporter. That I saw my duties in covering the Games, presenting objective information, and telling interesting and true stories, all while taking my audience’s interests into account but not necessarily indulging their passions.
“I am not going there to “support our lads”, “play my small part” or “participate in the common cause”, I wrote listing the usual tropes of Soviet and Russian journalistic dogma. “I am not in the business of helping the citizens of Russia in their eternal desire to “rip them a new one for the Motherland.” I am not a generator of pride or a semiconductor of patriotic feelings… Leave fandom to fans and reporting to reporters.”
The reason I felt it necessary to convey my position was because it was rather unusual in the Russian cultural and professional context. Most journalists actually did tend to describe their role as some type of camp followers to a glorious conquering army: providing support and reassurance to the boys and girls as they bring the world the good news of Russian physical superiority. Most of my colleagues referred to Russian athletes exclusively as “nashi” (“our lads/gals”) and not so much blurred the boundary between fans and reporters as staunchly refused to acknowledge its very existence.
I felt like I did an adequate job explaining why I viewed this approach as fundamentally flawed. Silly me. When I arrived in Vancouver, one of my colleagues told me that my blog post became a subject of a scandal in the newsroom. Some of the fellow writers, including the widely revered Elena Vaytsekhovskaya (a 1976 Olympic gold medalist in diving), went into veritable hysterics and loudly demanded my removal from the team. Someone who doesn’t root for Russia, Vaytsekhovskaya yelled, had no place writing about sports in a Russian newspaper. Vaytsekhovskaya, a product of the Soviet sports system, would view any such dissent as treason and a knife in the Motherland’s back.
Luckily for me, the editors either didn’t consider me this much of a threat or couldn’t be bothered to change assignments so close to the Games, so I went and worked at those, and two additional, Olympics. As for Vaytsekhovskaya, she currently works for RT, the official propaganda channel of Putin’s government, and her most recent contribution to sports journalism consists of a lament about “our boys” absence at an international figure skating event.
The fact is, folks in the West often gravely misunderstand the relationship between sports and politics in Russia, something that Russians are always keen to exploit.
In the wake of Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, sports governing bodies across the globe moved to sanction or outright ban Russian athletes and teams. Most of these bans remain firmly in place. Russian national teams cannot participate in World Cups or European championships, Russian soccer clubs are banned from UEFA competitions, Russian athletes, when allowed to compete, cannot use their nation’s symbols or represent Russia in any official capacity. And, in most sports, some kind of qualification exists even for “neutral” Russians, such as non-involvement in government organizations or absence of explicit support for the war.
Russians, predictably, have responded with laments about “politicization of sports” and “collective punishment”, and while the former hasn’t gotten much traction around the globe (Russians should talk, really!), the latter, unfortunately, has.
Folks in the West, in many, cases, have chosen to believe the fiction of “innocent Russian athletes” who should not be punished for the crimes of their government. This includes both regular fans, who don’t want to give up the pleasure of watching their favorite hockey and tennis stars, and sports governing bodies who have introduced the idea of “neutral Russians” at international events.
So, please, try to listen to this person who has deep, professional knowledge of the workings of Russian sports when he says that the current sanctions don’t go nearly as far as they should. And repeat after me:
There.
Are.
No.
Neutral.
Russians.
Let’s start with the obvious: The IOC’s criteria for determining which Russians can compete as “neutrals” are a farce.
From the get-go, it was obvious that there was no effective way to enforce these rules. Short of finding enough Russian-speaking employees to police every athlete’s social media account, there was nothing the IOC could do other than accept each athlete’s non-military status at face value. As a result, we have a modern pentathlete who has supported kidnappings of Ukrainian children, a wrestler who went on a tour of occupied territories to pal around with soldiers, and another who honored a war criminal, a Taekwondoin who has publicly praised Putin and festooned his social media with Z’s and many, many more, all of them competing internationally, some in the upcoming Paris Olympics.
The very same ones in which the Ukrainian delegation will be the smallest ever, at only 140 athletes. Their country being subjected to “collective punishment” for the crime of existing, you know.
The idea of “neutrality” is further undermined by the fact that Russians don’t recognize the concept of neutrality itself.
Remember when Wimbledon moved quickly to ban Russians in 2022 only to find itself alienated by the world of tennis and quickly surrender? Russians have been competing in all tennis events ever since, albeit without a flag next to their name. Well, as far as you can see, anyway, because Russian media absolutely plasters their flag in their graphics and always refers to them as “motherland’s representatives” and “our lads.”
Of course, the entire notion of tennis players being “citizens of the world” not beholden to national representation is laughable when talking about Russians, as amply demonstrated by Elena Vesnina, seen in the link cheerfully accepting decorations from Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s war criminal in chief.
“We still know who we are and where from”, quotes a Russian sports outlet one of the 15 “neutral” Olympians, all depicted with the national flag at their backs.
Granted, Russians have chosen to pull out of many Olympic events, citing the “indignity” of having to compete as “neutrals”, but this only goes to prove the point that Russian athletes are their nation’s representatives first and athletes second. Putin didn’t invest into a massive doping program because he is an overzealous fan. He didn’t spend lavishly on the 2014 Olympics and the 2018 World Cup because he loves attending sporting events. Sports in Russia are, and have always been, a propaganda business. Hell, in the old USSR, administration of international sports fell under the auspices of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee. They never hid this.
Additionally, Russian athletes never view themselves as anything other than the soldiers of the Motherland’s soft power wars.
If you speak Russian, you may notice a peculiarity of terminology that athletes use when describing their achievements. They don’t “compete”, they “defend the honor of the Motherland”. They don’t “succeed”, they “bring glory to Russia”. They are not “athletes”, they are “our country’s representatives.”
There are real historical reasons for this, too. Modern sports are a product of the industrial revolution, and in the developed capitalist nations of the West, they sprung up organically, as a commercialized version of popular pastimes. Whether it was English public school boys practicing their peculiar rules of football, industrial workers trying to occupy their suddenly available leisure time, or American college students living up to the doctrine of “muscular Christianity”, athletics traditions in the West are uniformly self-created and grassroots. Heck, America’s first Olympians competed in the uniforms of their universities.
In the Soviet Union, mass sports came into existence as an initiative of the Red Army in order to train new soldiers (CSKA’s original name was “Experimental and Demonstration Playground of the Universal Military Training Program”), while spectator sports were created by decree of the Communist Party specifically with political goals in mind. In 1948, Stalin even refused to allow Soviet athletes to compete in the Olympics because his officials could not guarantee the overall first place in the medal standings.
In short, Russian sports exist for one goal only: to prove the West how might and undefeatable Russia is. There literally is no other reason, and it’s amply reflected in the way sports are presented in Russia and covered by the media.
Which is exactly why the current sanctions on Russian athletes are not enough!
Sports bodies must realize that sanctioning Russians is not in any way any more morally questionable than it was to sanction white South Africans for three decades. Back then, very few people would doubt that giving the apartheid regime a platform to promote its white supremacy wasn’t a great idea, no matter what private thoughts and feelings those white athletes could have harbored.
Russian athletes advertise their regime’s fascist ideology and imperialist ambitions, whether they want it or not. And, make no mistake, most of them do, and happily lend their name to the regime, whether they play in the NHL, are signed by European soccer clubs or throw hissy fits at Ukrainians, while opportunistically and duplicitously competing under another nation’s flag.
Which is why the answer is, and always has been, to ban all Russians from all sports, completely, while Putin’s regime is in power, while Ukraine is occupied and while the Russian society at large has not atoned for the crimes against its neighbor.
Yes, many fans will not like this. NHL fans in particular would kill and maim for the pleasure of watching Putin’s official representative (yes, he has actual papers identifying him as such) Alexander Ovechkin wack a few more pucks into nets. But it’s high time they realized that their hobbies aren’t all that important, in the grand scheme of things.
But being on the right side of history always is.
Out of curiosity, how exactly does one say "rip them a new one for the Motherland" in Russian?