Alina Zmushka of AIN before the women's 100-metre breaststroke final at Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, France on July 29, 2024.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
As part of the Olympics’ ongoing effort to contain Russia as a chaotic sporting force, they’ve come up with a new name for its competitors: AIN. That’s French for “individual neutral athletes.”
It used to be ROC, which stood for Russian Olympic Committee, but no one was supposed to say the full name out loud. Just “ROC.” That was part of the punishment. Announcers said it anyway. All the time. The Russians were obviously Russian.
In Paris, not so much. The AIN are more Belarusian than Russian, and it’s difficult to tell them apart.
On an alphabetic list of the countries here, the International Olympic Committee slots the AIN last. They are not included on any official medal table. Not that they’re winning much. It took them a week to win their first gold.
They don’t have an anthem. The IOC went so far as to write them a song. It sounds like a dull copy of the opening scroll of Star Wars. Back in Tokyo, they had a lovely section of Tchaikovsky.
Tokyo was the salad days for Russia as the bad boy (and girl) of the contemporary Games. While out on Olympic parole, they could be found swaggering all over the joint.
Nobody was having a good time at that sweltering COVID-19 event, but Russia was. Despite being banned, it finished fifth in the medal standings. Neat trick.
After years spent trying to coax Russia back into the member-in-good-standing column, the IOC gave up after the invasion of Ukraine. Russian athletes used to get a more or less blanket pass as long as they were able to show they’d never been caught doping. Now they must swear oaths and be invited.
More important, Russia is much less likely to allow its athletes to attend. It has started paying them to skip the Games.
Vladimir Putin is planning his own mini-Olympics a month after the real one. Maybe he’ll invite Iran and North Korea and turn it into an autocratic jamboree. Sounds like a blast.
All to say that this sporting rupture between Russia and the rest of the world is starting to look like a permanent break.
Is it terrible to say I miss them?
It was wrong-headed to punish them as the IOC did in the first place. If you want them out, kick them out. Otherwise, just let them in. The Olympics is about sporting honour, not separating the good from the bad.
Russia brought something crucial to the mix: villainy. Without antagonists, the protagonists have nothing to overcome but their own limitations – which sounds dangerously close to therapy.
Try watching a TV show where everybody’s nice. They only made one of them. It’s called Sesame Street, and you gave up on it a while ago.
The quality of the AINs who are here is off, and I’m not talking athletically. They seem to have been selected for their winsomeness. All their quotes sound like something out of Steinbeck.
“No asks at all,” AIN trampolinist Anzhela Bladtceva told reporters here when someone brought up the war. “Only positive questions. No one is saying bad things.”
Bladtceva is knee-high to someone who is knee-high to a grasshopper. This is weaponized cuteness. What is Olympic Russia without truculence? It has no purpose.
Back in Tokyo, they were saying things like, “If Russia has no flag, we will be the flag” – rugby player Alena Tiron.
Now they’re slinking around hoping not to get buttonholed into a conversation about exporting long-range missiles to Kyiv. It’s unbecoming.
Maybe people should start saying some bad things to them. No problem ever got solved by ignoring it. If Russia felt something more than impersonal bureaucratic pressure, that might make an impression. The AINs might even take it home and spread word of it around.
As it stands, this will be the first Olympics with no memory of a Russian doing something notable. No feats, no quotes, no fights. The Paris Games are not even being shown on Russian television.
The take-away: You can do an Olympics without Russia, but you shouldn’t.
You can and should do every other sort of sport without them. If my neighbour was constantly popping off about how he’d like to wipe me out, I wouldn’t invite him to my barbecue. That’s what Western pro sports are doing about Russia. But the Olympics is a different case.
This event is based in two connected ideas: that we can all get together without fighting, and that once that happens, we will fight.
Without someone to beat, the beating doesn’t mean much. It’s great for the individual athletes, but despite what the IOC is always saying, this isn’t about them. The Olympics is a game of politics played by nation states.
No country that sees itself as a player in the world can afford to fail here. To do so steadily would chip away at national self-confidence. Even Canada – a country that couldn’t care less about excellence – finally accepted that.
Imagine if America was no longer among the top three on the medal table? That would be a measurable sign of decline. Rather than any built-in advantage, that is why America wins.
In order for those wins to preoccupy a populace, some must be seen to come at the expense of an enemy. If there is no enemy, an enemy will be created.
Thanks to Beijing’s adventures in creative pharmacology, you can see people here trying to turn China into the new Russia. But that won’t work. China doesn’t play the game. It won’t pick a fight. It has no sense of theatre.
Russia does – always will. It can turn any Olympics into the final act of a Chekhov play, when the gun starts getting waved around.
The Olympics does not feel right without them. The longer it goes on like this – with one of the leading cast members skipping the performance – the greater the risk of the Olympics beginning to slowly unravel.
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