The surprise decision, the competitions will start tomorrow
Russian and Belarusian athletes will not be able to participate in the Beijing Winter Paralympics. 24 hours after the opening ceremony, the reverse of the IPC (International Paralympic Committee) arrives which, fourteen hours after having authorized the presence of the aforementioned delegations as neutral, without symbols or appearing in the medal table, has decided on an unprecedented choice.
“The climate of the Paralympic Village has become unsustainable in the last few hours and what was decided yesterday would have jeopardized the normal running of the Games – said the president of the world Paralympic movement Andrew Parsons at a press conference -. Many Committees and other individual athletes have threatened not to compete and this would have made this Paralympics impossible and the reaction of the Ukrainian delegation was positive after our new decision. We cannot yet tell you how we will organize the return of the Russian and Belarusian athletes, also because we want them to understand that it is not their fault, but of the decisions of their governments, which have violated the Olympic truce and we are sorry that they are victims of all this ” .
Thus, after a further meeting (in the Chinese morning; ed), 83 athletes were excluded from the Games. The number one of the IPC specified that there have been no physical attacks or attacks in the last few hours, but the fear was that the atmosphere would become too hot and that the climate would become unsustainable given what was happening thousands of kilometers away. Many questions from the international press about the sudden change of opinion, to which Parsons replied as follows: “There was a rapid escalation of events and we did not want to unleash a mass boycott following the international events that we all know and our decision that our Statute followed. I understand that this war has been going on for 8 years, but compared to then and the previous editions of the Paralympics, none of the Committees, including the Ukrainian one, had moved as it is doing now and we had to prevent the situation from degenerating ».
Thus the gloss of the head of communication of the IPC Craig Spence: “We hope that now we can only talk about the athletes, their stories and the Opening Ceremony tomorrow, but no one can predict what will happen in the next few hours”. Among the various actions, it is also possible to appeal to CAS by the Russian and Belarusian Committees for the decision banning their athletes from participating.
#Ukraine #Paralympics #IOC #Russian #Belarusian #athletes