Excluding Russia has successfully disrupted Putin’s strategy in sport
As international sports bodies move to reintegrate Russia, they once again stress the “neutrality” of sport. Stanis Elsborg argues that this language obscures what has really been achieved by excluding Russia from the international sport’s scene.
International sports organizations like to tell a comforting story about themselves: That sport stands above politics. That it unites rather than divides. That it remains a neutral space – even a force for peace – untouched by the violence unfolding beyond the stadium walls.
It is a powerful self-image. And one that is now being tested.
As senior sports leaders move to reintegrate Russia into international competition – as evidenced in statements by IOC President Kirsty Coventry and FIFA president Gianni Infantino as well as decisions allowing Russian athletes, flags, and anthems at the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympics – the language of neutrality has returned with force. IPC President Andrew Parsons speaks of inclusion, diversity, and the danger of “politicization”, while Infantino claims the ban “has not achieved anything” and has “created more frustration and hatred.”
It is a soothing narrative. And a revealing one.
What is at stake is not merely Russia’s return to sport, but international sport’s eagerness to return to a more comfortable fiction – one in which neutrality absolves responsibility, and normality established at the price of collective conscience. All while overlooking what kind of actor the sports world is letting back in, and how Vladimir Putin has used sport strategically for decades.
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets then International Paralympic Committee president Philip Craven at the opening ceremony of 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, as Putin was initiating the military annexation of Crimea. Photo: Hannah Peters / Getty Images
How Putin turned sport into political infrastructure – and what exclusion actually disrupted
For Vladimir Putin, elite sport has never been a sideshow. Since taking office at the end of 1999, he has turned sport into one of the Kremlin’s most effective tools of political communication. Ceremonies, anthems, medals and sporting events have been used to project national unity, international respectability, and historical destiny.
This strategy grew out of the identity vacuum of post-Soviet Russia. In the divisive turmoil of the 1990s, sport offered a uniquely visible, emotional and globally legible language through which the nation could imagine itself being reunited. Hosting rights, medal tables, sporting events on home turf, and televised ceremonies became instruments of pride, the formation of a new national identity, and continuity between Russia’s past greatness and its present ambitions.
At the center stood Putin himself. The Kremlin cultivated an image of the president as an athletic, disciplined and physically dominant leader – the judoka, the hockey player, the tireless and bare-chested outdoorsman – deliberately contrasted with the weakness and disorder of the Yeltsin era. This bodily self-staging functioned as political language, presenting the leader’s body as a guarantee of national strength and control.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Games marked the peak of this strategy: not merely a sporting event, but a choreographed assertion of power in which architecture, ceremony and media saturation fused into a permanent stage for authority. Outside Russia, that legacy was quickly overshadowed – first by the annexation of Crimea, then by the exposure of Russia’s state-run doping system, revealed by the courageous Russian whistleblowers Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanovs in cooperation with German journalist Hajo Seppelt.
However, Putin’s use of sport has also been about mobilizing emotion at home. National euphoria generated by sporting triumphs and mega-events – saturated with flags, anthems and “us versus them” logic – has repeatedly been converted into political consent for aggression. The pattern is difficult to ignore: the invasion og Georgia during the 2008 Olympics, the annexation of Crimea following the Sochi Games in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine shortly after the Beijing Games in 2022.
Flagbearer and cross-country skier Lyudmyla Pavlenko (front) of Ukraine enters the stadium wearing a shirt reading “peace” during the closing ceremony at the Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games. The Paralympics unfolded under messages of peace and inclusion, while Russian forces were annexing Crimea. Photo: Hannah Peters / Getty Images
In each case, sport provided not just distraction, but momentum – a reservoir of collective emotion that could be redirected toward aggression.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Olympic movement’s sanctions against Russia for its doping machinery were half-hearted. So-called neutral athletes were allowed to display Russian symbols under the banner of Russian Olympic Committee.
But when the invasion of Ukraine triggered a much more consequent exclusion of Russian athletes, it did disrupt something that mattered deeply to the Kremlin. It stripped away legitimacy, visibility and symbolic capital. There were no anthems for global audiences, no flags raised, no ceremonies to be repurposed as proof that Russia still belonged at the center of the world.
State-controlled television was forced to rely on archival footage rather than live spectacle. Flagship sports – ice hockey above all, a cornerstone of Russian masculine and military symbolism – lost their place on the international stage. One of Putin’s preferred theaters for projecting normality, prestige and power was, at least temporarily, closed.
This is why Infantino’s claim that the ban “achieved nothing” ring hollow – and seems more like Infantino’s attempt to rewrite history.
Exclusion was not designed to stop tanks. It was designed to make it harder, not easier, to convert sport into propaganda, and to signal that aggressive war carries consequences even within a sporting world that had long accommodated Putin’s political use of sport.
The frustration Infantino refers to is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of impact.
Yet the response of international sport in 2022, while unprecedented, was also incomplete.
Athletes were barred, but Russian sports officials were not. Throughout the war, Russian representatives have continued to sit on sport’s executive committees and governing bodies, even the IOC, retaining the ability to lobby for reinstatement.
This reflected a deeper unwillingness to confront how sport actually functions in Putin’s Russia – not as an independent civic sphere, but as a vertically integrated extension of state power.
Why neutrality became a problem, not a principle
Russia’s exclusion also shattered sport’s own self-image. For decades, international sports leaders have insisted that politics must be kept out of sport. Once Russia’s exclusion was imposed, a precedent was set – and with that came a dilemma the IOC, FIFA, the IPC and other sports federations have yet to resolve.
If aggressive war justifies exclusion here, what about elsewhere? What about powerful states whose leaders abuse sport while investing heavily in it? What does neutrality mean when the Olympic Charter and statutes are breached? These are uncomfortable questions.
They threaten the flexibility of global sports governance, and they risk blocking sport’s access to generous investments from authoritarian, belligerent countries. This may explain the urgency with which sports leaders now reach for the language of peace, inclusion, and depoliticization.
Remember what is being reopened
Nowhere are the stakes of Russian reintegration clearer than at the upcoming Paralympics in Milano Cortina beginning on 6 March.
The Paralympic movement emerged from the ashes of World War II – from broken bodies, rehabilitation, and a commitment to dignity after destruction.
In 2014, as the Sochi Paralympics unfolded under banners of peace and inclusion, Russia invaded Crimea. While athletes competed, borders were broken. During the opening ceremony, a giant icebreaker named Mir – “peace” – crushed symbolic barriers inside the stadium, even as real ones were dismantled by force just beyond the Black Sea.
Russian athletes sing their national anthem as bronze medalists Lada Nesterenko and Oksana Shyshkova of the Ukraine cover their medals at the medal ceremony for the Women's 12.5km Visually Impaired Biathlon on day eight of the Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games. Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
Ukrainian athletes competed under extraordinary pressure. Some covered their medals during the Russian anthem. Others pulled out. Ukraine entered the opening ceremony represented by a single flag-bearer. Sport was not neutral ground.
Now, we are told by IPC President Andrew Parsons that the Paralympics should once again serve as a space of inclusion.
What this means in practice is rarely stated plainly. Ukraine athletes are once again being asked to compete beside the symbols of the state destroying their country. To perform with composure and “neutrality” while their homeland fights for survival.
To reopen an Olympic stage for Russian athletes is not an act of peace. It is an act of neglect – an act that shifts the burden of harmony from the aggressor to those already paying the highest price.
