Russian athletes representing summer sports have less and less hope for a positive outcome of the difficult situation with a trip to the 2024 Olympics. Even many fans no longer believe in the triumph of our sport, to say nothing of the professionals.

So they start looking for workarounds. In athletics, we see attempts to change citizenship, in handball – just moving to European championships, so that if not in the Games, then at least in international tournaments. To condemn or support such decisions of our athletes is a personal matter.

But after a public speech by the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and a highly influential IOC official, it becomes clear that Russia will not be in Paris 2024.

Grey Cardinal

Sir Craig Reedy is 81 years old. He ended his active international activity in 2019, when he resigned as head of WADA after six years of valiant service in this post. For Russia, these are the years of imprisonment, suspensions, neutral statuses and all that nightmare that happened after the Sochi Olympics. For Reedy, this is an incredible rise in his international career.

Craig Ready / Photo: © Lauren DeCicca / Stringer / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru

Strictly speaking, it was not the Englishman who initiated the doping scandal around our country, but he did his job meticulously and with the most negative effect for Russia. He recommended the IOC to remove us from the Games in Brazil, but then Bach did not dare to disqualify all athletes, limiting himself to a ban on athletics, except for Dasha Klishina.

Everyone remembers the history of the Winter Games in South Korea: neutral status and personal invitations from the IOC, which our athletes received on a selective basis. Sergei Ustyugov, who dominated skiing at that time, was not convicted of any dubious doping test, he could not go to Pyeongchang.

Photo: © Tomi Hänninen / Keystone Press Agency / Global Look Press

It was all the more comical to read the Englishman’s comments about the desire to protect clean athletes:

– If you take the entire sports community, there was a large group of athletes who wanted to protect pure Russian athletes. And our job was to try to protect them all. And I think we succeeded. First of all, I don’t think bans have really worked well in the history of the sport. We now have more power than before, but we decided to keep the balance and not use it,” Craig said in December 2019, when his term with WADA was coming to an end.

Apparently, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire completely forgot how much suffering he brought to our guys and girls with a spotless reputation.

They will cope with Russia even without the IOC

After leaving the Anti-Doping Committee, Reedy did not stop his membership in the IOC. He has been with the organization since 1994, and for 28 years Craig has formed around himself the image of a person who is listened to very carefully. Still, in addition to working at WADA, he was also Vice President of the International Olympic Committee, and from 2014 to 2016 he combined these positions.

Now he has a lot of free time, so he found inspiration and wrote his own autobiography, and at its presentation he answered several questions about the fate of Russian and Belarusian athletes:

— I’m afraid that we will have to make a decision about what will happen to each of these two countries. And I think the general consensus would be that they shouldn’t qualify. Therefore, at first glance, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to qualify, except in those three sports (tennis, judo, cycling) where the situation is different. Can they qualify? [из этих трех видов спорта]? I’m not sure.

Strategically, Craig says that even with the desire to achieve some kind of “golden mean” in the issue of admitting Russians, the organization will face a lot of contradictions. And to avoid this, it is easier to maintain the status quo, that is, neutrality in relation to the current situation. Now everything is so that even without additional intervention by the IOC, our athletes will not be able to compete in Paris:

“However, now the problem arises that about two years before the Games, the qualifying period begins, set by the international federations and the IOC. Therefore, there is a real problem for the federations, which have a clear instruction with which they agreed that they will not invite Russians and Belarusians to participate in competitions, the sports official notes.

And without participation in the selection it is impossible to go to the Games. The bulk of the qualifying tournaments will take place in 2023, but in some sports we could fight for a ticket to France already this season. But we won’t. The European Handball Championship will be held without Russia, as well as, with a high degree of probability, the world championship in artistic gymnastics.

Of course, there is tennis, judo, cycling, where even now the attitude towards our athletes is special – they compete under a neutral flag. But there is no guarantee that they will be invited to Paris 2024. Everything will again remain at the discretion of the IOC.

Given the rhetoric of Sir Reedy, whose opinion is not a philistine assessment of the situation, but speaks of the mood within the IOC, no one will make concessions for Russia. Thomas Bach and his associates will simply stand on the sidelines and watch how the hands of individual federations will deprive Russia of the Olympic Games.