WHILE Putin allows his mobilized soldiers to be slaughtered in the carnage all around BakhmutRussian sports media fear that this war will soon destroy the possibility of participating in the next Olympics.

Over the next few months, it will be organized qualification for the Paris 2024 Summer Games in most sports. In these competitions, Russians regularly win not participate because Russia is banned by most international special federations:

• Therefore, it is urgent that the Russian sports authorities put an end to the international boycott of Russia.

This delay is also seen by savvy sports executives who understand that it is impossible to abandon Putin’s propaganda sport as long as the Russian invasion razes Ukraine.

Former IOC leader Gerhard Heiberg is the first of them, although for many years as head of Olympic revenue he had a close connection with Vladimir Putin. The other day, the 83-year-old sports veteran rejected all attempts to let Russian athletes enter the backdoor of the Paris Summer Olympics:

– Plan to create acceptable conditions for safe participation for some Russian athletes comes far too soon, SO Heiberg in a interview with subject website “In the Games”and explained why it is necessary to stick to the ban:

– Putin is so obsessed with sporting triumphs that keeping Russia out of the Paris Olympics might at best curb some of his terrorism. Now Western countries should rather wait for the end of the war and not go in the wrong direction, he said, warning of loopholes for Russian sports heroes as Putin and his generals remain fiercely aggressive

Today, this interview is causing a stir in the international Olympic community and outrage in Russia.

FOR With this, Gerhard Heiberg is the first major international sports leader to openly dare stand up to The dangerous new political tricks of IOC President Thomas Bach.

At the beginning of December, there was a suggestion of the Olympic Committee of Asia (OCA) on drop to Russian athletes at the Paris Olympics even as the war in Ukraine was still raging. Russia was still supposed to be banned, but not Putin’s sports heroes. This plan promised IOC to continue working with, and Thomas Bach opened for Russian athletes who “did not support the war“.

INTERNAL in the Olympic movement, it is a badly hidden secret that such heavy political proposals Never is promoted without them in advance is whitewashed with the all-powerful IOC President Thomas Bach.

So it was most likely his plan to circumvent a war in Ukraine which should spoil a large part of the sports festival in Paris.

The manifest opposition to Gerhard Heiberg arouses all the more respect.

Here challenger him his own president.

His wife didn’t like him being friends with Putin

IN THE INTERVIEW Heiberg rightly points out the unlikelihood of Western democracies participating in another Putin Olympics in the midst of a war that is precisely about every nation’s right to govern itself democratically:

– Allies of Ukraine; that is to say essentially the whole of Europe, is united on this, underline Gerard Heiberg.

He could also have mentioned Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and the United States, although the United States Olympic Committee had recklessly supported the proposal. It is an attitude that does not stand the test of daily grand politics:

• A 2024 Summer Olympics that facilitates Putin’s sports propaganda in the midst of a war against Western democratic values ​​is unthinkable.

It will lead to a generalized boycott and will be a step towards the abyss for the Olympic movement.

Just help Putin

THE official Putin-Russia sees it differently. There, Gerhard Heiberg is now portrayed as one provocative that the IOC must stop:

– The attitude towards Heiberg is strange, said Dmitry Svishchev; Member of the Duma and former president of curling, to Sport-Express, recalling that the main adversaries of Russia are precisely in Northern Europe:

– Today’s OPC members don’t speak so badly. I think this statement is an attempt to manipulate public opinion. If I was at the IOC, I would have forbidden a former member to say such a thing. It’s completely against the Olympic spirit.

At the throat of Europe

SO it will probably not be easy to get out of Gerhard Heiberg’s analysis of this major political dilemma for the Olympic movement, even if the Norwegian is described in the Russian media as “radical“.

– pay no attention Heiberg’s Horror Stories. He is retired, to write the Sport-Express commentator to reassure his readers, but this commentator is surely not so confident about Putin-Russia’s Olympic future after all:

– The mere fact that a boycott of the Paris Olympics is being discussed complicates the task of the IOChe continues, and marvels at how a former IOC stalwart like Gerhard Heiberg has become so quickly”radicalized» :

– And Heiberg is unfortunately not alonecontinues the Sport-Express commentator and conveys Putin’s criticisms to the respected French sports newspaper L’Equipe.

FOR in L’Equipe has the veteran commentator Alain Lunzenfichter downplayed Thomas Bach’s dreams of peace for the Paris Olympics next summer:

– The IOC’s position is not based on knowledge. This is idiocy. The plan will kill the Paris Olympics, to write him, and affirms in the name of the proud French organizers:

– We will not be Olympic Games. We become toys of war.

Break with Norway

THE It is in the understanding of the larger political landscape that Gerhard Heiberg’s clear agreement with Thomas Bach is so central also in purely sports politics:

• If Putin’s sports heroes are allowed to travel to Paris, it will shift the focus from the Olympics to war.

The current representatives of the Norwegian IOC must think about it. Kristin Kloster Aasen became one of Thomas Bach’s closest associates and Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen heads the International Olympic Committee.

Both must also choose sides.

FOR now it is urgent. Later this week, the leadership of the Russian Gymnastics Federation feared that this war would last a long time. In turn, the Russian participation in the EC in May is crucial for having the chance to participate in the Paris Olympics in one of the most important Russian sports.

But for those of us outside of Putin’s Russia, standing up to his barbaric war must be more important.

This is the truth that Gerhard Heiberg reminds us.

Throw it now!

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