The World Friendship Games, Russia’s alternative to the Paris Olympics from which the country was banned, have been postponed to 2025, the president of the Russian Weightlifting Federation, Maxim Agapitov, said on Tuesday (16).
“The Friendship Games were planned. I know officially that the games have been postponed until next year,” the official said at a press conference, as quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax.
According to Agapítov, “due to the postponement of the Friendship Games, our calendar [de competições] changes, for this year we no longer had other important international events planned, since, naturally, the Friendship Games excluded the rest of the preparations and competitions”.
Earlier, Match TV reported that the general director of the Friendship Games organizing committee, Alexey Sorokin, resigned on the 5th, although he is not out of the event, as he continues to work as an advisor. He was succeeded by the vice-president of the European Muay Thai Federation, Dmitry Putilin.
The Friendship Games, hosted by Moscow and Yekaterinburg, were scheduled for September this year.
Faced with the ban on Russian sport from international events due to doping scandals and the war in Ukraine, Russia has proposed holding alternative competitions.
This is the case of the BRICS Games, held in Kazan last month, and the Future Games, held in February also in that city and which combined traditional sport with high digital technologies.
The possibility of postponing the Friendship Games had been discussed for a month in the Russian media, with the main reasons being security concerns and the fact that holding them immediately after the Paris Olympic Games would not allow for the presence of Western athletes who expressed a desire to participate in this event.
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