The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued recommendations last week that paved a way for Russian and Belarusian athletes to return to international sports—an incident that has since resulted in other nations threatening a boycott of the Olympics.
IOC President Thomas Bach advised sports federations that individual athletes from Russia and Belarus should be allowed to return to competition under a neutral status—without an identifying flag or national anthem—as long as they do not show solidarity with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and are not linked to the country’s military or national security agencies. Russian and Belarusian athletes would also be banned from taking part in team sports such as basketball and football (soccer).
Bach added that the Olympic governing body was still deliberating whether to include Russia and Belarus at the 2024 Paris Games. Nevertheless, several western European and Baltic governments were quick to criticize the IOC’s recommendations. Germany sports minister Nancy Faeser called it a “slap in the face of Ukrainian athletes” while Poland’s Foreign Ministry “strongly” urged the IOC to reconsider its proposal.
Ukraine’s government announced that its athletes will not participate in any qualifying events for next year’s Olympic Games in Paris where there are Russians competing. It also reiterated its previous threats to pull out of the upcoming Games and called for allies to boycott the event if Russian competitors are allowed to compete—a decision that Bach deemed goes against Olympic “principles.”
While the IOC has repeatedly claimed that it would be the “end of world sports as we know it” if governments decided which athletes could participate at international events, the history of Olympic boycotts has proved otherwise.
In fact, the Olympics has a century-old legacy of countries opting to boycott rather than compete against nations they believe should not have been allowed to participate.
In 1920, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Turkey were denied the opportunity to compete at the Olympic Games in Belgium—one of the countries that was occupied by Germany—following their collective defeat at World War I. Germany, Japan and Bulgaria were also excluded from 1948 London Games, the first Olympic event in the aftermath of World War II.
Four years later, Taiwan staged the first official Olympic boycott when it withdrew from the 1952 Helsinki Games due to China’s participation for the first time under communist rule. China would go on to boycott the Games until 1980 in protest of Taiwan’s inclusion. During 1984 Los Angeles Games, the IOC made Taiwan compete as compete as Chinese Taipei and under the Olympic flag. This has not changed despite Taiwan being an independent nation.
During the Cold War, Egypt and its allies Iraq and Lebanon boycott the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne in protest over the country’s invasion by Britain, France and Israel during the Suez Canal crisis.
Eight years later, South Africa was banned from participating at the 1964 Tokyo Games due to its institutionalized system of apartheid. The country would not return to the Games until 1992.
In 1976, 29 African and Arab countries—including Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, and Zambia—boycott the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal in protest against the inclusion of New Zealand, which maintained sporting ties with apartheid South Africa.
Arguably the most famous boycott occurred during the 1980 Moscow Summer Games, when 65 countries led by the United States refused to participate in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Despite its size, the boycott did not appear to impact the war, as the Soviet Union remained in Afghanistan until 1989. Since then, the U.S. has not attempted to boycott the Games.
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