MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the International Olympic Committee of “ethnic discrimination” ahead of the 2024 Paris Games, from which Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from competing under their national flags.
The IOC still has to make a final ruling on whether athletes from Russia and Belarus, a key ally for Moscow in its offensive on Ukraine, will be permitted to compete next summer.
“Thanks to some heads of the modern International Olympic Committee we found out that an invitation to the Games is not an unconditional right for the best athletes, but some kind of privilege and you can get it not on sports results but by some political gestures,” Putin said at a sports forum in the Urals city of Perm.
“The Games themselves could be used as an instrument of political pressure towards those people who have nothing to do with politics, and as a gross - in reality - racist, ethnic discrimination.”
He added that: “Some sports officials have simply given themselves the right to determine who is covered by the Olympic Charter and who is not.”
Putin later said he believed new sporting bodies and leagues would eventually replace what he called an existing "monopoly" over international sport.
“All kinds of (new) leagues, associations, clubs and so on ... They will certainly undermine the existing monopoly of officials over international sport,” he said.
The IOC last week suspended Russia's national Olympic body for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine’s membership by recognizing regional organizations in occupied Ukraine.
Russia launched a full-scale offensive against Ukraine in February 2022, with its neighbor Belarus allowing Moscow's troops to use its territory as a launchpad.
Putin accuses IOC of ‘ethnic discrimination’ against Russians
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Putin accuses IOC of ‘ethnic discrimination’ against Russians
- The IOC still has to make a final ruling on whether athletes from Russia and Belarus will be permitted to compete next summer
- "Thanks to some heads of the modern International Olympic Committee we found out that an invitation to the Games is not an unconditional right for the best athletes," Putin said
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
