The International Olympic Committee advised Olympic sports bodies on Monday to end the programme vetting Russian athletes for neutral status, clearing the path for Russian participation in qualifying events for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The move follows a similar decision approximately two months earlier allowing Belarus — Russia’s military ally — to compete under its national identity. The IOC provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee, imposed in October 2023 after Russian officials incorporated sports councils from occupied Ukrainian territories into the Russian Olympic structure. The IOC stated those conditions “no longer applied.” Russian athletes may not yet compete under the Russian flag or anthem; that decision will come “at an appropriate time.” The IOC emphasised it would continue to support the Ukrainian Olympic movement and would not hold events in Russia or invite Russian government officials to its ceremonies.
The received wisdom
The case for readmission, as the IOC makes it, rests on the separation of athletes from state: individual competitors who had no voice in their government’s decision to invade Ukraine should not be permanently barred from the world’s premier athletic competition because of actions they did not take. The IOC also notes the practical difficulty of indefinite exclusion — pressure from national Olympic committees in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who see exclusion precedents as potentially applicable to their own governments’ actions, and the commercial reality that the Los Angeles Games, already drawing enormous corporate interest, will be larger and more globally resonant with Russian participation. The vetting process introduced after 2022 — which required Russian athletes to demonstrate absence of military affiliation and pass multiple doping controls — was presented as a meaningful safeguard, even if only 32 Russian and Belarusian athletes were cleared for Paris 2024 compared to more than 300 at Tokyo 2021.
A different read
The IOC’s statement that the original conditions for the Russian Olympic Committee’s suspension “no longer apply” is a diplomatic circumlocution that rewards examination. Russia has not withdrawn from Ukraine. The occupied territories have not been returned. Russian missiles continue to strike Ukrainian cities — including a third attack on Kyiv in a single week just days before the IOC’s announcement. What appears to have changed is not the underlying situation but the IOC’s appetite for maintaining a position that creates diplomatic friction with member federations, complicates broadcast negotiations, and produces athlete-welfare arguments that are genuinely difficult to rebut.
The IOC has a consistent institutional history of prioritising universality over accountability. The 1980 Moscow Olympics proceeded after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the United States led a boycott but the IOC did not itself exclude the Soviets. The 2008 Beijing Olympics went ahead six weeks after China’s military crackdown in Tibet. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were awarded to Russia in 2007 and held as scheduled despite Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia. In each case, the IOC’s argument was some version of the same: sport transcends politics; athletes should not pay for governments’ sins; engagement is better than isolation. The argument has a genuine moral core, and the IOC is not entirely wrong to make it. The problem is that this principle is applied selectively in ways that tend to favour continuity over accountability.
Consider the comparison: Russia’s doping programme — a state-sponsored operation that manipulated the 2014 Sochi Games’ results on an industrial scale, documented in the McLaren Report — resulted in the same gradual erosion of exclusion. After the 2018 “Olympic Athletes from Russia” formulation and the 2020/21 “ROC” neutral status at Tokyo, each successive games saw more Russians under softened terms. The lesson learned by Russia’s sports establishment is that systematic cheating at the Olympics produces a reduction in team size and a delayed return — not permanent exclusion. The lesson learned by state sponsors of doping elsewhere is much the same.
There is a specific irony in the timing of the LA 2028 decision. The United States and Iran are conducting military strikes against each other. The US and Russia are, through Ukraine, in a sustained proxy conflict. The LA Games will be held on American soil and will almost certainly draw large, security-intensive delegations from both countries. The IOC’s stated policy of keeping “government officials” out of its ceremonies provides no actual security architecture for an event in which Russian and American state interests will be directly, if athletically, contiguous. Olympic venues in Los Angeles in 2028 will require diplomatic management of a complexity the IOC’s institutional culture has never historically shown itself equipped to handle.
It is worth being specific about what accountability would look like, not merely what it is not. A credible accountability framework would require Russia to formally acknowledge the occupation of Ukrainian territory as a violation of international law as a precondition of full flag-and-anthem reinstatement. It would make the doping testing programme permanent rather than conditional. It would create binding arbitration for disputes about athlete eligibility rather than leaving them to IOC executive discretion. None of these things are on the table. What is on the table is a graduated, time-limited softening of restrictions that follows the established IOC pattern — not because the underlying facts have changed, but because 2028 is approaching and Los Angeles needs a full field.
What to watch
The flag-and-anthem question will be the proxy battle for all of this. Watch whether the IOC announces full reinstatement of Russian national symbols before the first qualifying events — which would effectively render the neutral-athlete distinction meaningless — or maintains the fiction of separation. Watch Ukraine’s response: Kyiv has been consistent in opposing Russian participation and will likely escalate its lobbying of Western IOC member federations and broadcast partners. Monitor whether any major US sponsor makes a public statement about Russian participation — corporate pressure from the broadcast and sponsorship community has historically moved the IOC faster than government lobbying. Finally, watch the Dakar Youth Games in October — the first major IOC event since the suspension was lifted — as a practical test of how the readmission is managed on the ground.
— J