The Paris Olympics are underway and the Russian athletes are not allowed to participate. The MP from the pro-Russian party Levica (The Left), Redzep Ismail, claims that the last such case was the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. That is untrue, and Ismail creates the false impression that the Nazis, who ruled Germany at the time, banned Russian athletes from participating, and that now, the same is happening in Paris. 

Author: Vangel Bashevski

The MP from Levica, Redzep Ismail, twists the truth in a Facebook post and says:

Spin: By the way, the last time the Russian athletes were banned from participating in the Olympic Games was in 1936, organized by Nazi Germany …

Other than pointing out that the Olympics in 1936 were held in Nazi Germany, his post is illustrated with a photograph of Hitler. That creates a false impression that the Nazis were the ones who banned the Russian athletes from participating and that those, that are banning them now, are similar to the Nazis.

[Source: A post on Facebook by the MP Redzep Ismail 28.7.2024]

Counterspin: Redzep Ismail’s claim that the last time the Russian athletes were banned from participating was in 1936 is twisting the truth, i.e. spin, additionally, he is withholding a number of facts from Russian Olympic history, which is quite complex.

First of all, what are “Russian athletes”? Are they representatives from Russia or are the athletes with Russian passports and neutral status also Russian? And should athletes from the Soviet Union (USSR), of which Russia was a part of in 1936, also be considered Russian? Ismail has no answer for that. Even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is sometimes vague on these issues, but still provides some guidance.

According to the IOC, the Olympics are mainly attended by athletes sent by National Olympic Committees, so it turns out that Russian athletes are those that the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) stands behind. It is logical that they too perform under the Russian name, flag and national anthem and that the medals they receive will be attributed to Russia.

In accordance with that, the last Olympics, when they were “banned” (like Ismail says) are the current ones. The reason being Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine and the suspension of the ROC for its appropriation of athletes from the occupied territories.

Some athletes with a Russian passport are now participating in the Olympics, but under the abbreviation AIN (Individual Neutral Athletes), so they are de jure not Russian, and their medals are not attributed to Russia nor is the Russian name, committee, flag or national anthem present there.

The ROC was suspended in 2018 as well, the reason being the doping scandals, which Ismail is tendentiously withholding. Some uncompromised athletes were allowed to participate under the abbreviation OAR (Olympic Athletes from Russia), but they weren’t representing the country and there were similar restrictions for them as there are now in the current Olympics.

In a controversial way, the ROC was later allowed to come back to the Olympics, although they didn’t stop with the schemes, and the World Anti-Doping Agency forbid Russia from participating in international sport events in the following 4 years.

Russia appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the Russian Olympic Committee returned to the Olympics in 2020 and 2022, but with a punishment-they competed under the abbreviation ROC. There were a ton of restrictions there too, so do we consider the athletes that participated there as Russian? According to the president of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, they weren’t Russian athletes, they were neutral athletes. That is a bit unclear, but it is how he described it.

Nevertheless, the last case of “banning” of Russian athletes was not during the Olympics in 1936, and in order to understand what happened then, when need to look further back in time.

Russia entered the Olympics during the imperial times, in 1900, and formed its own committee in 1911. At one point that became a prerequisite for performing in the Olympics.

In 1917, Soviet Russia was created, which abolished the committee as “bourgeois”, and in 1922 it became a federal unit of the USSR, which was already a new state and here things got complicated. Because of their communist ideology and the politicization of their sport, Russia and the USSR were not accepted into the Olympics from 1920 to 1936.

Whether it was for this or for other reasons, the USSR did not have its own Olympic Committee then. It was not formed until 1951-NOK SSSR and it first competed in the 1952 Olympics.

At one point, the USSR even dismissed the Olympics as “bourgeois” and promoted the so-called Spartakiad, in which in addition to Soviet athletes there were representatives of communist movements from other countries, and the most memorable was the one in Moscow in 1928.

The USSR later softened its stance, and it was the same with Hitler. He initially rejected the Olympics, but changed his mind after realizing that they could be a propaganda weapon. However, Berlin was chosen as the host of the 1936 Olympics as early as 1931, before Hitler came to power, so it had nothing to do with Nazism at first.

Because of the bad publicity he had and the threats to boycott the Olympics, Hitler made some concessions. He temporarily halted anti-Semitic propaganda and agreed to host some Jews, African Americans and homosexuals there, meaning the 1936 Olympics were not entirely Nazi-oriented.

Consequently, the Soviet non-participation was not due to a ban by the Nazis, but, as one source says, it was due to the anti-Communist stance of the IOC president, the Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour. The father of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, expressed displeasure at the non-invitation of the USSR, but his opinion was not respected.

The USSR was also to blame for this non-participation –it did not put enough effort to get out of that sporting isolation. Other sources claim that the USSR itself refused to participate, but this is not explained and does not coincide with what has been previously stated.

Although it seems logical that the Nazis and the USSR were fierce competitors, that was not the case, and in 1939 they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and became allies.

The non-participation of the 1936 Olympics affected all Soviet athletes, not only those from Russia, but those from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan etc. But Ismail focuses only on those from Russia, as if they were the only victims of discrimination.

When it comes to considering the Soviet athletes as Russian, we need to mention this as well: the ROC is recognized as the successor of the NOK of the USSR, and Russia has declared itself as the continuator of the USSR, which is something even more serious and by which Russia has taken over its membership in international organizations, its seat in the UN, etc. However, is this also the case for the Olympics? Can we attribute a medal from an athlete from Soviet Ukraine or Kazakhstan to Russia? This is complex and controversial.

Also, Russia is not a unique case when it comes to the Olympics, whether it is justified or not, other countries have been “banned” as well. The 1920 Olympics did not invite the countries defeated in World War I, while the 1948 Olympics did not invite some of the countries defeated in World War II. In 1964, South Africa was barred from the Olympics because of its racist apartheid regime, and a ban on participation is now in place for Belarus as well.

The USSR was first invited to the Olympics in 1948, but did not participate. In 1951 NOK SSSR was formed, after which it was recognized and took part in 1952.

The story is quite complex while Ismail simplifies it, withholding a number of important facts and creating the impression that (we paraphrase): “The Nazis ‘banished’ Russian athletes in 1936, and now some new Nazis from the ‘troubled West’ are doing the same”.