The Ghost of the Soviets and the Penalised Athletes
A glance at the top three in the medal table at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics reveals the following:
- China — 15 golds
- USA — 13 golds
- Russia — 8 golds
Russia finishing third with eight gold medals might not seem startling on its own.
What is truly astonishing is that they achieved this with a squad of just six athletes. This statistic alone is enough to reopen the long-standing debate over the status under which Russian athletes are permitted to exist in international sport. It is not merely a question of who wins how many medals; it is about the extent to which an athlete’s career can be held hostage to the political record of their country of birth.
For Paralympic athletes, this question carries even greater weight. The Olympic and Paralympic Games are not merely a showcase held every four years; they represent the pinnacle of years of rigorous discipline. Excluding a Paralympian from this four-year cycle means stripping away their prime competitive years, their sponsorships, and their visibility—often ensuring they can never return to elite competition.
The international sporting establishment has long presented itself as an impartial and peaceful arbiter. In reality, it governs the power dynamics that dictate who is deemed acceptable and who is persona non grata with palpable bias.
It is no coincidence that in the shadow of war, the immediate impulse is to penalise artists, athletes, academics, and ordinary citizens along with their passports. Eager to act, the system finds it far simpler to discipline the accessible rather than directly hold the powerful to account.
Treating an athlete’s body as an extension of the state—declaring, "You cannot carry this flag, you cannot hear this anthem, you may only compete by erasing your identity,"—and applying this almost exclusively to Russia hardly sounds neutral.
The fact that Russia serves as a convenient pariah for the West makes this manoeuvre easy. Behind this collective ostracisation lies a deep-rooted cultural reflex inherited from the Cold War. Decades of depicting the "menacing East", the "closed society", and the "untrustworthy Russian" across popular culture and diplomacy have made it effortless to erase the individual identity of a Russian athlete in a single stroke.
This is precisely where the double standard becomes glaringly obvious:
We do not hold an Israeli athlete personally responsible for their government’s military campaigns.
We do not expect a British or American athlete to atone for their administration's foreign policy or military interventions on the podium.
When political leaders take centre stage—such as Donald Trump presenting medals alongside the FIFA President at the 2026 World Cup final—hardly anyone objects to politics encroaching on sport.
Yet when it comes to Russian athletes, the presumption of innocence is suspended. They are required to politically cleanse themselves, bracket their identity, and accept their role as living scapegoats for the state.
The breach opened within the Paralympic framework in 2026 will pose an unavoidable test for the IOC ahead of Los Angeles 2028: on what moral grounds can an athlete compete under their national flag at the Paralympics, only to be deemed "stateless" in the Olympic arena?
While the architects of war remain in their summits, oligarchs protect their offshore fortunes, and diplomats mingle in VIP lounges, it is the athletes on the field who pay the price.
Sport exists precisely so that individuals who oppose one another’s politics can meet eye-to-eye on the same starting line under equal rules. The moment athletes are reduced to state proxies, the Olympic spirit ceases to exist. If sport is truly to serve as a universal language of peace, it must first abandon the selective morality that saddles athletes with the sins of their governments.
