Moscow plans its own mini-Olympics. Will Russians be satisfied?

Russian athletes may still be banned from competing with their national flag or anthem in this year’s Olympics. But Moscow has a plan to keep its sports institutions intact, its athletes busy and well paid, and, it hopes, Russian fans satisfied.

In September, just a month after the 2024 Paris Olympics, Russia will launch the World Friendship Games, a Soviet-inspired extravaganza that looks like a full-scale substitute games meant to defy the International Olympic Committee’s ban. Russian officials insist that it isn’t intended to replace the Olympics, but rather that Russian, Belarusian, and other voluntary international participants will compete in many Olympic categories for large cash prizes and other honors.

Nonetheless, Moscow’s decision to launch these games and several other brand-new international sporting events has generated controversy in Russia, drawn condemnation from the IOC, and offered a select number of Russian athletes a dubious choice between taking part in these patriotic events or trying to compete in Paris as “neutral” or independent contestants.

“Only a very limited number of [Russian] athletes will qualify” to compete in Paris, the IOC said in a statement in mid-December. “Among the 4,600 athletes from around the world who have qualified for Paris 2024 so far, there are only 11 Individual Neutral Athletes,” six with a Russian passport, plus five with a Belarusian passport.

And while few Russians are happy about the Olympic ban their athletes face, it is unclear whether they will find these new competitions a satisfactory replacement.

Political games

The former Soviet Union was completely isolated from global sports until 1952, when it joined the Olympic movement. Soviet athletes quickly became a regular, highly successful fixture on the international sports scene.

Then in 1984, at a particularly bad juncture of the Cold War, the USSR and its allies decided to boycott the Los Angeles Olympics to prevent their athletes from being targeted for political condemnation over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, it staged a rival event, the Moscow Friendship Games, in which 50 countries participated. Few Russian sports experts today express any warm memories of those games or believe they contributed anything useful to world sports.

“You can call it anything you like, World Games or Universal Games, and offer astronomical awards, but such artificially invented competitions will never become real alternatives or drive athletes to better achievements,” says Eduard Sorokin, an independent Russian sports journalist. “At the end of the day, they will be lackluster political spectacles that have no lasting impact.”

Supporters of the alternative games include, ironically, many top Russian champions who made their names in international games and now occupy honored places in Russian society. Former NHL hockey legend Viacheslav Fetisov, now a deputy in the lower chamber of parliament with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, accused the IOC of “trampling on the rights” of all sports fans by banning Russian athletes from competing under their own national symbols. “The IOC burned the bridges, and it’s not known what they intend to replace them with,” he told journalists.

Irina Rodnina, a three-time Olympic figure skating champion who is also a Duma deputy, said that previous Olympic bans targeted Russian athletes for alleged doping, often with good reason. Now, she told the Russian media, “there are no complaints about the athletes, but there are complaints about the country. In this situation, I do not know, maybe I am from another generation, I would not go! With a flag or without a flag, I wouldn’t go at all! Because this is humiliation of the country.”

In order to participate in the Olympics as independent competitors, Russian athletes will need to demonstrate that they have no links to military or security services and do not support the war in Ukraine, as well as be willing to forgo their Russian national affiliation. That may leave many condemned to languish without any access to world-class competitions until the global geopolitical crisis is resolved.

Experience in previous Olympics in which Russian national symbols were banned suggests that the Russian public and players alike deeply resent the limitations put upon their participants, though it is not clear whether they will embrace the alternative games being ginned up by Russian authorities.

How much do Russians care?

In addition to the World Friendship Games in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which will largely track the sporting categories of the Summer Olympics, there will be a winter version called the Winter Spartakiad, probably to be held in Sochi, site of the last Olympic Games to be hosted by Russia in 2014. Also on the drawing boards is a projected BRICS Games competition, which is aimed at drawing athletes from the Global South. Russian sports authorities have talked about making a “turn to Asia” in their competitive focus that conforms with Russia’s broader political and economic realignments.

Some Russian athletes may find a way to compete as neutrals in the Olympics and other international venues. For the rest, the alternative games offer a make-work project for athletes to continue in some kind of competition, and also to earn money to keep going.

The Kremlin has authorized a huge budget equivalent to $90 million for this year’s World Friendship Games, including around $50 million in prize money. Though Olympic-level competitors from outside the sanctioned countries of Russia and Belarus seem unlikely to attend, second-tier athletes from other countries are welcome. Organizers optimistically claim the Friendship Games may draw up to 10,000 athletes from 137 countries.

Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent public opinion agency, says there’s been no good polling on Russians’ feelings about being excluded from big swaths of international sports. But the subject does come up in the focus groups his agency runs, and, he reports, about half of respondents say they acutely feel the isolation. “Everyone seems sorry about it and thinks it’s a bad thing,” he says. “The bigger part [of respondents] say Russia bears no blame, and the West is just plotting against us using Ukraine as a pretext. A smaller part blames Putin.”

As for the wider sense of being shut out, at least from the Western world, Mr. Volkov says there is little evidence that Russians care very much. “Sports is one field where the isolation is felt, but in general people don’t seem very worried. It should be pointed out that only about 20% of Russians have ever traveled abroad, and that’s a small part of the urban population. When the subject comes up, a lot of people object that we’re not really isolated because we have good relations with China. And polls do show that China’s image has improved with the Russian public.”

In the final analysis, the alternative games may keep Russian athletics on life support, at least for now.

“These alternative games cannot possibly substitute for the Olympics, but at least athletes will be able to compete and achieve some of their goals,” says Alexander Shprygin, a controversial sports commentator and former sports adviser to the right-wing, populist Liberal Democratic Party. “So the main purpose is to support the athletes, not to please the fans. All of them, athletes and fans alike, are just hostages of the political situation.”

Editor’s note: The story has been updated to clarify the number of Russian athletes who have the choice to attend international competitions like the Olympics.