I can’t endorse the UEG’s flouting of international sports decisions made higher up the tree. If this is a response to threats of boycotts from other countries, it’s a weak action. Russian athletes have a long history of friendship and collaboration with the wider world, and deserve better than this.
If you wanted to feel atmosphere, you would travel to a British football ground in the 1960s in the height of winter, all grey and rainy and muddy. Men and boys bundled up in hand knitted scarves and bobble hats and mittens and navy blue duffle coats, the flash ones in sheepskin coats with fluff bursting out at the buttons.
The anticipation at the beginning, the despair at the end, trudging home to be comforted with bangers and mash and cups of tea. Or the victorious march home through streets of cosy homes warmed by the light of the television chanting of results, the chattering of the teleprinter giving news of the away games.
Football was the engine of British morale for years, uniting our workplaces with allegiance and (mostly, good natured) rivalry, telling of family histories of fandom and following, making the chilly winters bearable, and heralding the summer in with a series of big championships that had everyone held in their thrall. Heroes were created, stories told; football had us hooked, a circus for the masses. It made life in the factory or on the fields bearable.
Elsewhere, in the East, there were different views. Football held the public imagination, but from 1917 the post revolutionary Soviet Union saw elite sport as bourgeois and reflecting the hierarchical structures of capitalist society. International sport was wholly rejected. Sport was instead seen as a means of preparing the workforce for work to the glory of the motherland, creating a fit and healthy workforce ready to face whatever tasks were necessary: militarily, industrially, in agriculture and farming.
By the end of WW2 (the ‘Great War’ in the USSR and, subsequently, Russia) debates had begun into the question of the State’s involvement in the Olympics. The USSR eventually joined the Olympic movement in 1951 and won its first Olympic medals in 1952. Olympic participants had to sign commitments to win medals. More than one sporting committee leader, by now as much politician as athlete or coach, lost their life in suspicious circumstances when targets were not met!
Gymnastics, as a model of ‘physical culture’, was one of the USSR’s most important sporting forms. It existed across multiple entities as promoter of public health, agent of collective mass exercise and channel for education. The various levels of competition up to and including elite international, made it a practice that every citizen could engage in, no matter their age, means or physical ability. Its relationship to other state endorsed and funded areas of traditional strength in the USSR - ballet and circus - also made gymnastics a mainstay of the USSR sports policy and practice, enhancing its presentation quality to Western audiences.
In the USSR, leadership saw sport as supporting a number of vital policy ends. (1). Sport drew together the many diverse ethnic groupings from the country’s vast geography, allowing for the naming of champions not only from Russia but from all of the various states of the USSR including for example Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Belarus. (2) Sport gave the workers heroes, heroes who looked and lived like them. Champions from the 1950s held medals from the Great War and bore the family scars of engagement in the horrors of battle. They came from broken families, but sport gave them a focus and a purpose and supported them in their daily struggles. Their families were hard working people just like you and me and they all had to get up early, work for their country, and contribute to the ‘shock’ work of exceeding the previous year’s performance, albeit in harvesting record crops of wheat or in winning gold medals. Heroes bolstered collective conscience and morale, demonstrating the importance of quiet daily work and going beyond the limits to benefit the community.
(3) Sports also presented to the wider world what the USSR wanted the rest of us to believe was the model USSR citizen, showing how the USSR system produced top class work in all domains. Alongside the USSR’s cultural production of heritage, literature and performance, and its scientific endeavours in the field of space exploration, we also witnessed the ground breaking, innovative techniques of Soviet sport. This is evident more in the ‘artistic’ sports of skating and Russia than any other area. We still, for example, visualise key gymnastics skills by their Russian names, eg Yurchenko, Shushunova and Tkachev. Thanks to the internet, high level and distinctive performance quality as characterised in the work of such gymnasts as Nemov, Detiatin, Korbut and Ilienko still figure in the collective sporting memory.
(4) Sport was used as a means of diplomacy and power brokering, especially in the appointment of Soviet personnel to high level international sporting positions. Yuri Titov as President of the FIG was one of the most visible Soviet functionaries in the world and one of very few Soviet citizens who were heard to speak English at that time. Appointments to the various technical committees of sporting bodies enabled Soviet influence and visibility at the highest level, creating links with other countries and encouraging exchanges, competitions, displays and training clinics.
The scale and priority of effort put into sports in the USSR hothoused technical, medical, cultural and other expertise to create a sporting super power whose superiority was clear, and which occasionally seeped over into the wider political domain, such as the tit for tat boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.
While top level diplomacy could result in hostile action, in the main the sum result of this effort was to integrate the USSR sports system within the western world. Speaking as a fan of gymnastics who attended many competitions and displays 1976-2013, the face to face effect of Soviet and Russian gymnastics was always more friendship than hostility. The gymnasts wandered freely out of competition time and were always happy to talk, pose for photographs, and sign autographs. Gymnastics gave me my curiosity about Russian culture, my concern for Russian people. It gave me friends, not enemies.
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, sport’s priority was lost as nations attempted to secure basic infrastructure and function as safe and stable places. Russia, along with Ukraine, inherited most of the sporting ‘capital’ such as training centres and expertise. Even if coaches and athletes migrated to work in other countries, the vast pre-existing sporting structure remained. There was a significant sporting legacy effect in Russia’s favour, lasting until today if you count examples such as the head coach of the Russian national team, Andrei Rodionenko, who was Soviet WAG head coach in the 1980s.
The legacy effect became international as technical and coaching capital spread worldwide, creating a deep and diverse well of competitive countries in a sport which had previously been dominated by a handful of politically homogenous nations.
Sport in Russia continued to receive funding at a national level (though not all regions were able to keep going). This allowed good results internationally until about 2004.
By then, President Putin was unhappy about the general decline in Russian sport. He wanted to revive the glory years of the Soviet Union, to elevate national morale and to support a feeling of well being to encourage votes for his Premiership and Presidency.
In its motivation his sporting policy bears uncomfortable parallels to his plans to integrate Ukraine into Russian territory. Today, that motivation involves cruel and military intervention. In 2006 it was less sinister. The President introduced a number of policies (1) to secure funding for sports coaching, (2) to encourage the staging of international multi sports events in Russia - this included assigning hugely profitable contracts to Oligarchs and to Russian corporate entities - and (3) to attract back to Russia the coaching talent and expertise they had lost to the West.
As part of (3), former USSR WAG head coach Andrei Rodionenko was brought back to Russia, along with other leading coaches such as Alexander Alexandrov and Oleg Ostapenko. Round Lake National Training Centre began to be rebuilt. Eventually, the medals began to come back to Russia. The glory days were being recalled in the public memory.
Other countries had ambition too, having learned the value of sports from the USSR’s glory days. Not all of the messages were positive. Some of the effort involved in winning victories was pharmacological. This scourge was international. As was the unboundaried ambition of coaches who abused their athletes for victory, and for more sinister, personal reasons.
It had all seemed so innocent and friendly. Mustafina and her team took gold in 2010. The Russian men revived and fought to Gold in 2020 + 1, as did the Russian women. Yet the balance of sport internationally had been tipped by political and other ambitions that did not respect the athletes.
Gymnastics was a clean sport, unaffected by the state sponsored doping scandal of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Gymnastics escaped the ban on Russia’s participation in the 2016 Olympics because they were one of the few clean sports in Russia at the time. As far as I know, they have maintained this record - see footnote.
When Russian first entered Ukraine it was a shock. The names of well known Ukrainian gymnastics homes were heard in the press. Ukrainians from Donbas were forced to resettle and train in Kiev. For years the bombs were falling, beginning in 2014.
Friendships between Russian and Ukrainian gymnasts were upheld. In 2015 Russian gymnast David Belyavski and Ukrainian gymnast Oleg Vernaiev were photographed together, hands linked over the Ukrainian and Russian flags. Despite Russia’s historic interference in Ukraine’s territory and politics, all seemed well in sport.
Yet the hostilities only escalated and finally turned to all out war in February 2022.
In an attempt to weaken the Russian economy, and hence support Ukraine, seen as a modern, progressive ally, the West took sides and began to impose sanctions on Russian oligarchs and corporate entities.
They also took action against the Russian sports system, including all the athletes. They would no longer be allowed to compete internationally.
No one knows why sports in particular were picked upon for this action. There are rich individuals who remain unaffected by the sanctions. Yet sport appears to be a softer target; perhaps it is considered a visible example to both the domestic Russian political audience as well as the West.
The IOC is stuck in muddy waters: if Russia deserves to be sanctioned because of its military action against another IOC member, why hasn’t Ukraine been similarly actioned for its retaliation? Why haven’t the USA, the UK and Saudi Arabia been sanctioned for their transgressions of human rights and military law? Russia is labelled the baddy in all of this mess; yet the incongruence involved in targeting Russia whilst not other countries is hard to understand.
As a long term fan, I neither agree nor disagree with the sanctions. I feel that Russia’s actions are cruel and unnecessary and deserve to be punished. At the same time I abhore all military action and don’t trust the Western nations who condemn Russia whilst causing damage through their own military, political and economic actions.
Sporting sanctions hurt the individual more than nations in this case. Whole generations of gymnasts prepared for international competition have missed the opportunity to win gold medals. The psychological and emotional damage to gymnasts like Listunova must be immense. Russia does worse damage, materially, to Ukraine; but we are speaking here of damage done to Russian individuals by Western institutions; it is strange that such damage is endorsed by those who like to present themselves as positive agents for change.
The sanctions can be seen as a slow acting agent, designed to erode the morale of Putin, his govt and public, and resulting in the slow death of Russian sport and its supporting infrastructure l. It’s hugely concerning; the war is unlikely to end any time soon, with all the death and destruction that involves. Our countries are being divided and isolated, efforts to improve the condition of the planet sidelined. Friendship links destroyed.
Russia’s strategy on a sporting level is to ignore the sanctions and continue as close to normal as they ever could; a competition between the juniors in China and Russia recently took place, and was no doubt a morale-raising exercise for the youngsters and coaches involved. The politicians are speaking of an alternative Olympics. This echoes attempts in 1984 to minimise the impact of the boycott of the LA Olympics, but then, the USSR was always going to return to international sport the year after, at the World Championships. Multiple years-long absence from the sporting scene was never envisaged, and is unprecedented unless we go back to the immediate post revolutionary period. Russia is being forced into isolation; this in itself is a hostile action by the West.
And now, after Europe has declined to offer athletes a licence to compete under a neutral allegiance, it’s even less likely that we will see individual athletes from Russia competing in Paris 2024, or in LA 2028, for that matter. It feels more and more as though there is a permanent policy of exclusion and isolation of Russia by the Western nations. There is no explanation of this action; it seems to be an emotional knee jerk, a bullying tactic designed to flatten Russia as a sporting entity as well as an evil military and political empire.
I can’t endorse the UEG’s flouting of international sports decisions made higher up the tree. If this is a response to threats of boycotts from other countries, it’s a weak action. Russian athletes have a long history of friendship and collaboration with the wider world, and deserve better than this.
Footnote - there was and is no evidence of systematic doping in the Russian artistic gymnasts. A small number of the women have been suspended for use of diuretics in over the counter weight loss drugs. These gymnasts were suspended by RUSADA from training but were not competing at FIG international competitions at the time and have not returned to full international sport. One member of the Russian MAG team, Nikolai Kuksenkov, had to be investigated for levels of Meldonium in his blood. He was cleared.