the essential
The IOC revealed the information this Friday June 28, less than a month before the start of the event in France (July 26-August 11).
The International Olympic Committee has authorized six additional Russians and two Belarusians to participate in the Paris Olympics (July 26-August 11), bringing their total number to 47, according to a third expanded list unveiled this Friday, June 28 in judo and canoeing.
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The IOC, which published a first list on June 15, before expanding it on Thursday, indicates that two Russians and two Belarusians are invited in canoeing and four Russians in judo. For the moment 20 of these 47 athletes have confirmed their presence, while many others have not yet made their response known, such as in tennis, where the Russians Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev, current N.5, have been invited and N.6 in the world, as well as, among women, the Russian Daria Kasatkina (N.14) and the Belarusians Victoria Azarenka (N.16) and Aryna Sabalenka (N.3), the latter having already announced that she wouldn’t go.
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Russian Liudmila Samsonova (N.15) declined the invitation. The IOC, which initially banned athletes from both countries after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has since organized their gradual return, under a neutral banner and under certain conditions. To be invited to the Games, the “neutral individual athletes” had to overcome both the qualification hurdle and a double check, by the international federations and then the IOC, of their lack of active support for the war in Ukraine and of links with the army of their country.
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The Olympic body still has to update its list, as the final results of the qualifications come in: no athlete will be part of it since the World Athletics federation has maintained a total exclusion of Russians and Belarusians, while some sports, such as swimming, have reintegrated them so late that their presence is uncertain.
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Last March, the IOC was counting on 36 Russians and 22 Belarusians at the Paris Games “according to the most likely scenario”, and 55 and 28 respectively “at most”, a much sparser presence than at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics: there were 330 Russians, while Belarus had qualified 104 athletes.
