Russia’s Medal Count At The Paris Olympics

Putin loves the Olympics.

Or he used to.

The games give his restless countrymen a distraction, and they give him legitimacy because Russia was competing against real countries.

In the Beijing Olympics in February of 2022, Putin wanted the attention so badly that he delayed his invasion of Ukraine. The Chinese Olympics ended on February 22^nd –  and Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24^th.

He had done the same thing a decade earlier; he waited until the Sochi Olympics were over – February 23^rd, 2014 - before invading Crimea on February 27^th.

In the current Olympics, Russia has its smallest participation in 30 years.

Russia is in fact banned, as is Belarus. 

The invasion of Ukraine was too egregious an event to pass unpunished by the Olympic Committee; the games after all were created to promote peace and understanding among nations.

This is the fourth Games in a row where entrants from Russia have not been allowed to compete under their own flag, though their ban for widespread doping violations has now ended.

Russian athletes can compete, but not as “Russians”.

Some two dozen Russian and Belarusian athletes were approved to compete under the Individual Neutral Atheletes delegation, or AIN (IOC country code after the French name Athlètes Individuels Neutres).

Russia had sent 330 athletes to the Tokyo Games.  Bit of a drop.

Now they are only allowed to compete in individual (not team) events, such as canoeing, gymnastics, judo, modern pentathlon, road cycling, rowing, shooting, swimming, taekwondo, tennis and weight lifting.

There are more than 100 Ukrainian athletes competing, by contrast.  The head of Ukraine’s Olympic delegation Vadym Guttsait said that “During the war, they [Russians] have no place in the international world.  Because every day our people, women and children are killed. Every day they bomb us, and the missiles are flying over our country.

“Our mission at the Olympics is to remind the world that Ukraine survived.”

The imbalance in the numbers and in the status of the two countries is already a victory for Ukraine.

It is a symptom of the way passions heated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have boiled over into almost every realm, from global travel to family values and international sports.

Consider for example the effort Putin out in sports before the war to legitimize his rule: under Putin, Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Now all of that is not just gone but reviled by the West as the ploy that it was revealed to be.

In the Paris Olympics there were two nations missing when the invitations went out to 203 countries.

Russia and Belarus will be watching from the sidelines.

Actually, they were not even invited to the sidelines.  The International Olympic Committee justified the ban because of the two countries' aggression against Ukraine, calling it  "the senseless war." 

Ukraine has insisted that, given Russia's aggression in Ukraine and the assistance that Belarus has provided in the war effort, that those athletes should not be present at international sports arenas. Ukrainian President Zelensky had previously accused the IOC of attempting to “bring representatives of the terrorist state into world sports.”

“There is no such thing as neutrality when a war like this is going on. And we know how often tyrannies try to use sports for their ideological interests. It is obvious that any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained with blood.”

Belarus, recall, is the country that Russia thinks is safely capable of holding nuclear weapons.

In retaliation, Russia put on a disinformation campaign against the Paris Olympics.  A network of Russian-affiliated groups criticized the games.  The efforts included a deepfake video by an alleged Tom Cruise, who narrated a documentary putting the games in a bad light.  Called ‘Olympics Has Fallen’, it uses artificial intelligence-generated audio of the film star’s voice to present a “strange, meandering script” disparaging the IOC.  It was created by Storm-1679, which has in the past deceived US actors including Elijah Wood into recording messages on Cameo, a website where people can pay celebrities for personalized video messages, which were then turned into anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

Ukraine’s first medal in Paris was a bronze in fencing, won by Olga Kharlan in women’s saber fencing.  It was her fifth career medal.

The Association of Ukrainians in France (AUF), in collaboration with the Ukrainian World Congress and the Office of the President of Ukraine, organized a memorial march in Paris.  “Russia has killed 488 Ukrainian athletes and coaches since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began,” the organizers wrote.  Illia Ponomarenko has an excellent video on the fallen heroes.

Some had been killed while fighting in the Ukrainian army, and others died in the continuing Russian bombardment of civilian Ukraine.

Among those being honoured is Maksym Halinichev, a promising boxer who was the junior European champion in 2017; he was killed at the front in March 2023 at the age of 22.  Others notable athletes include Ivan Bidnyak and Yehor Kikhitov, both pistol shooters and members of the Ukrainian national team. 22-year-old Stanislav Hulenkov’s body was only identified 10 months after his death.  Gymnastic coach Anastasiia Ihnatenko died in a Russian missile strike along with her husband and their 18-month-old son.

On a side-note, Palestinian athletes were given a warmer welcome by the French crowds that the Russian athletes.  The eight team members – the most ever entered in the Games  - were greeted by chants of “free Palestine”.  The Palestinian ambassador to France Hala Abou said she has lost 60 relatives in the war that has killed 39,000 of her countrymen.

By the time the next games roll  around, in 2028, I hope that Russia can compete – because it would mean that the war in Ukraine is over.  Of course, there may be many more nations competing, if Russia breaks up on the rough road to peace.

The last Olympics that saw the participation of the Russian Empire was in 1912; the Empire at that time included Finland.  The team was headed by Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, cousin of Nicholas II.

The Grand Duke himself took part in horse riding competitions at the Games.  Later, he would try out for his own medal in the “let’s assassinate Grigory Rasputin event”; the team tried cyanide (no effect), pistols, and then pistols again when Rasputin recovered from the first round of pistol bullets.

Then they threw him in the river.

So like Putin, they would merit the “lead” medal, though their lead eventually worked.

When the successor state the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, seven of its 15 former republics entered the 1992 Olympics as the “Unified Team”. 

That feeling of bonhomie lasted only one year.  From 1992 onwards a host of new flowers bloomed on the grave of the USSR, and entered on their own to the Games:  Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan,  Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan…and of course Ukraine.

Now winning in the ultimate event:  freedom.

Going for gold.

While Russia is not even there…going for the exit. 

There should be a medal for Russia disappearing.  Something like a miniature manhole cover with Putin’s face on it.

But I doubt that it would ever be a collectible…