Children practice biathlon in front of the children Olympic reserve school, which was damaged during a Russian rocket attack, in Chernyhiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Just how seriously the Soviet Union took the Winter Olympic Games is evident in a secret Central Intelligence Agency report dated December 28, 1952, titled “Soviet Sport and Intelligence Activities.”
Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had agreed for the nation to make its Olympic debut at the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, convinced that Soviet athletes would win the most medals. The Soviet regime, however, did not share similar optimism for the Winter Games and stayed home in 1952.
“The Soviet Union purposely did not want sports teams abroad for the 1952 Olympics because the position of Soviet Winter Sports was still relatively weak,” the CIA report said. “There was apprehension at the Committee of Physical Culture and Sport that the USSR would not gain sufficient points from their participation in skating, skiing, etc.”
It was a position that would soon change.
The Soviets arrived in Cortina d’ Ampezzo in January 1956 for its Winter Olympics debut with one of the Games’ largest contingents, 53 athletes, 47 men and six women, backed by a government funded sport system that had spent an estimated $20 to $35 million, $417 million in today’s dollars, on preparing the team at high altitude training camp, specialized coaching and year-around programs.
The return on the Soviet investment was evident in the Olympic medal count. Soviet athletes led the 1956 Olympics in both total medals (16) and gold medals (7).
“The Soviets’ immediate success on the medal table heightened international debate over amateurism and state-sponsored sport,” said Lauren Goss, athletics archivist for the University of Oregon libraries and an expert on Russia’s Olympic participation.
Writing after the Games in a Sports Illustrated article titled “Lessons from Cortina,” Andre Laguerre asked, “To the U.S., which ought to be the greatest sporting nation in the world, they blinked a warning: to stop and think, where do we go from here?”
The same question could be asked today 70 years later.
With the Winter Olympics returning this week to Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Games co-host with Milan, Russia once again finds itself the center of another international debate over its place in global sports and specifically the Olympic Games.
For a fifth consecutive Olympic Games, athletes will be prevented from representing Russia because of sanctions against the country.
Only 20 Russian or Belarusian athletes will compete in the Milano Cortina as a result of the IOC’s ban against Russia and Belarus in response to the Putin regime’s February 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine and the launch of Europe’s deadliest war since World War II.
“This will be nothing new,” said IOC president Kirsty Coventry, who will be presiding over her first Games this month. “The (IOC) executive board will take the exact same approach that was done in Paris (2024 Olympics). Nothing has changed.”
The IOC banned Russia in October 2023, 20 months after the invasion, for violating the Olympic Charter by taking over sports councils in four regions in eastern Ukraine. But while some international sports federations, most notably World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, imposed an absolute ban on Russian athletes competing internationally, the IOC created a process where athletes could compete at the Olympics as individual neutral athletes (AINS) after going through a vetting system to ensure they have not actively supported the war in Ukraine and have no affiliation with military agencies.
Thirty-two Russian and Belarusian athletes competed as AINS at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“The process we used in Paris was successful and that’s the exact same process we’re using now,” Coventry said.
Few on either side of the debate share Coventry’s appraisal of the ban.
Russian president Vladimir Putin and many Russians maintain the IOC has unfairly singled out the country, and the ban is evidence of hypocrisy within international sport. Ukrainian athletes and their supporters argue that the ban doesn’t go far enough and have called on the IOC and other international governing bodies and professional leagues like the NHL to adopt a total prohibition on Russian athletes competing.
“There’s been no admission, no accountability. Zero,” Terrence Burns, a brand and marketing consultant for five Olympic Games, including the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, told Inside The Games, referring to Russia. “That leaves the IOC in a tough but manageable position. If Russia wants to rejoin, it’s going to have to demonstrate its willingness to change.”
Ukraine’s prime minister Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Coventry to take a strong stand against Russia in a September telephone conversation.
“Every sporting event that Russia manages to access, it always tries to twist for the benefit of its state propaganda: propaganda of hatred and war,” Zelenskyy said after the call.”Since the start of the full-scale war, more than 600 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed as a result of Russian strikes, and hundreds of sports facilities have been destroyed,” Zelenskyy reminded the IOC president.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has said it is “inconceivable” that Ukrainian athletes would have to compete alongside athletes from Russia and Belarus while Russian forces bombed and killed innocent civilians in Ukraine.
Skiing and biathlon’s international governing bodies have adopted absolute bans on Russian and Belarusian athletes competing internationally. The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation had a similar ban until it was overturned following a Russian appeal. Now nine Russian and Belarusian bobsleigh and skeleton athletes will compete in Milano Cortina.
“Not only we in Ukraine, but many other countries that defend life, still expect the IOC to maintain the principled stance it held during the Paris Olympics regarding aggressive Russia and its accomplice, Belarus,” Zelenskyy said after his call with Coventry.
Dominik Hašek, the Hall of Fame and 1998 Olympic gold medal-winning Czech goaltender, has been one of the most vocal and pointed critics of the IOC and the NHL.
“In essence, they are sending a message to the criminal Russian regime that Russia can continue making similar threats against citizens of other countries without the slightest problem,” Hasek said after the IOC cleared Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in the Paris Olympics.
Hasek was outraged by the NHL’s promotion of Russian superstar Alexander Ovechkin’s bid to break Wayne Gretzky’s NHL goalscoring record last spring, tweeting the day before Ovechkin broke the record that the NHL “bears enormous responsibility for the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people killed and maimed in the Russian war in Ukraine.”
In response to the tweet, Dmitri Medvedev, deputy chairman to the Russian security council and a former president and prime minister, reportedly posted what Hasek took as a death threat.
“895 – the result of a great Russian player,” Medvedev reportedly posted on Telegram, referring to Ovechkin’s goal total. “P.S. We are waiting for the suicide of the crazy Czech Hašek.”
“This person is clearly publicly threatening me with murder,” Hasek told a Czech sports publication.
Putin has called the IOC ban “gross and, in fact, racist and ethnic discrimination” and that it has nothing to do with sports, a view widely shared in Russia.
“The ban on Russian teams participating in the Olympics and other international competitions continues to provoke anger and indignation in Russia,” said Robert English, a USC professor specializing in the history and politics of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Russia. “Certainly most ordinary Russians agree with Moscow’s official condemnation of such bans, though we know that some Russians who criticize the war blame their own government, not the international athletic federations, for the crisis.
“The majority view in Russia is that the ban is hypocritical—were American athletes banned when the US invaded Iraq? Because the IOC, (the International Ice Hockey Federation) and other such bodies are Western-dominated, Russians easily conclude that it is all politics. It’s also important to understand that such bans extend beyond sports, for example on Russian artists and musicians. Together with all kinds of new sanctions and visa restrictions on ordinary Russians seeking to travel in Europe and the US, the Olympic restrictions just feel like one part of a broader closing off of the West to Russians.”
Putin continues to play the persecution card when addressing the Olympic ban.
“Vladimir Putin’s government has been telling its people that restrictions on Russian participation in the Olympics are an example of ‘Russophobia’ and anti-Russian discrimination,” said Columbia professor Thomas J. Kent, a specialist on disinformation and Russian media.
James Macleod, the IOC’s director of national Olympic committee relations, said the organization is trying to keep the lines of communication with Russian authorities open.
“We need to make sure that the contacts remain even in difficult periods to ensure there could be a pathway to come back at some point,” Macleod said.
“It is a complicated issue inherited by the new IOC President,” said Stephen Wenn, a professor at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University and author of “Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal.” “The IOC’s mandate compels it to seek ways for the Russian athletes to compete, but their ability to do so, and the terms of their participation will likely continue to be tied to the decisions made by the country’s leadership.”
The Olympic Games established the Soviet Union and its state-supported sports machine as the pre-eminent power in international winter sports for parts of four decades, a level of success that became tied to its national identity both domestically and globally.
Starting in Cortina d’ Ampezzo, the Soviet Union dominated the Winter Olympics through nine consecutive Games. Of the nine Winter Olympics the Soviets competed in, they finished atop the medal standings at seven Games, and also finished with the most gold medals seven times. While the 1988 Calgary Olympics was the last time the Soviet Union competed in a Winter Games, nearly 40 years later, it still ranks fifth on the Winter Olympics’ all-time medal table with 194 medals, 78 of them gold.Russia would pick up where the Soviets left off, topping the medal table at the 1994 Winter Olympics, the first Games where Russian athletes competed under a Russian flag, with 23 medals and 11 gold medals. Twenty years later, the Russians won a Games-leading 29 medals at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, which would later be tainted by the greatest doping scandal in Olympic history.
“The Olympics need Russia at the Games, just as they need the United States or China,” Burns told Inside The Games. “The true Olympic ethos is ‘We all belong, or no one does’. That works in theory, in speeches and in marketing campaigns, but translating it into the geopolitical world is far harder.”
But Russia has spent the last decade as a pariah within international sports.
A report released in November 2015 from a probe led by Richard Pound, the former World Anti-Doping Agency president and then the IOC’s longest serving member, outlined “a deeply rooted culture of cheating,” a state-sponsored doping program in which Russian athletes were tipped off about upcoming drug tests, and Russian anti-doping agency employees routinely accepted bribes to cover up positive tests. Moscow drug-testing lab officials admitted to intentionally destroying more than 1,400 drug test samples a few days before a WADA inspection. WADA voted to ban Russia from the 2016 Summer Olympics, only to have the IOC reject the ban.
Another WADA-commissioned report released in 2017 found that Russia’s elaborate state-sponsored doping program involving 1,000 athletes in 30 sports produced at least 27 ill-gotten Olympic medals and undermined the integrity of two Olympic Games and several other major international sports competitions over a four-year period. The inquiry conducted by Canadian attorney Richard McLaren also found that the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, the country’s Ministry of Sport, officials for the WADA-accredited Moscow drug testing lab and even the Federal Security Services (FSB) — the successor to the Soviet era KGB — were involved in covering up positive drug tests for Russian athletes and the “manipulation of” drug testing, even tampering with tests for Russian athletes at the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi.
“For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians,” McLaren said at the time.
The IOC finally banned Russia in December from competing at the 2018 Games after an IOC investigation confirmed a “widespread culture of doping in Russia” in which national sports officials provided performance-enhancing drugs to Russian athletes in dozens of sports and covered up positive tests, most notably at the Sochi Games.
“This was an unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and sport,” IOC president Thomas Bach said at the time. “The IOC (executive board), after following due process, has issued proportional sanctions for this systemic manipulation while protecting the clean athletes. This should draw a line under this damaging episode and serve as a catalyst for a more effective anti-doping system led by WADA.”
But the IOC also offered individual athletes the opportunity to compete the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, as “Olympic Athletes from Russia” under a neutral Olympic flag if they could prove they were not part of the doping scheme. Only 168 Russian athletes passed the vetting process.
WADA banned Russia from all international sports for four years on December 9, 2019, after the organization found that data provided by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RADA) had been manipulated by Russian officials in an effort to protect athletes involved in the state-sponsored doping program. But in a ruling in December 2020 on a Russian appeal of the WADA ban, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Russian athletes should be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games and other international competitions. Under terms of the CAS ruling, Russian athletes for two years would compete in the Olympics as “Neutral” athletes or teams.
More than 200 Russian and Belarusian athletes competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Four days after the Olympic flame was extinguished in Beijing, Russia invaded Ukraine. Bach and the IOC recommended that sports federations ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from international competitions and cancel or relocate any events planned in Russia or Belarus.
“In addition, the IOC EB urges that no Russian or Belarusian national flag be displayed and no Russian or Belarusian anthem be played in international sports events which are not already part of the respective World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sanctions for Russia,” the IOC said in a February 25, 2022, statement.
Three days later, however, the IOC said its executive board “leaves it to the relevant organization to find its own way to effectively address the dilemma.”
It wasn’t until October 12, 2023, that the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee.
“The Russian Olympic Committee is no longer entitled to operate as a National Olympic Committee, as defined in the Olympic Charter, and cannot receive any funding from the Olympic Movement,” the IOC said in a statement.
Russian officials seemed surprised by the IOC move.
Then Russian Olympic Committee president Stanislav Pozdnyakov, handpicked by Putin to lead the organization, said, “I don’t see any difficulties here,” referring to the ROC taking over jurisdiction of four regions previously presided over by the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine.
“Russia was surprised by pretty much everything regarding the invasion, starting with the poor performance of its military,” Columbia’s Kent said. “It’s clear Putin expected to seize the Ukrainian government within days, after which he expected the country to surrender immediately to Russian rule. He thought everything would be over before the outside world could react in any significant way.”
In September 2022, Pozdnyakov had encouraged Russian athletes to serve in the invasion.
“From the point of view of the Russian Olympic Committee, we, being citizens of the country, consider service to the motherland is an honourable duty and an honourable duty of every citizen, including members of national teams,” he said.
Two days after the Milano Cortina Games’ closing ceremony will mark the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The war has left a minimum of more than 15,000 Ukrainian civilians dead, more than 40,000 wounded, according to the United Nations.
The BBC estimates that as of December 140,000 members of Ukrainian forces had been killed, with between 275,800–391,600 members of Russian forces dead.
The initial outrage in Russia toward the IOC’s ban has given way to resignation.
“The Olympic ban seems to be accepted for now in the Russian media, which does at least acknowledge that some athletes — those in the biathlon particularly — are struggling without Olympic-level competition,” said Stephen M. Norris, director of Miami of Ohio’s Havighurst Center for East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. “Instead, Russian newspapers report on sporting events like the (UEFA) Champions League and on the success of Russian athletes, particularly in hockey. To me, this is an implicit nod to what the Russian state sees as the hypocrisy of banning Russians in the Olympics but not from the NHL.”
But one headline in the Sport-Express, the Russian sports daily newspaper, last month caught Norris’ eye: “American Boys: The Entire Podium at the US Championships was Taken by Russians — A Month Before the Olympics!”
The article was referring to the sweep of the men’s medals at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships by the sons of six skaters raised in the Soviet sports system. Maxim Naumov’s late parents, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, killed in a plane crash last year, were 1994 World pairs champions for Russia. Andrew Torgashev’s parents skated internationally for the Soviet Union. Torgashev’s maternal grandparents actually live in Odesa, Ukraine, one of the cities hardest hit in the war. The parents of Ilia Malinin, the pre-Olympic gold medal favorite, actually skated for Uzbekistan at the Olympics, although his grandfather, Valery Malinin, competed for the Soviet Union and is currently a skating coach in Russia.
“It saw the victory of Ilia Malinin as proof that American figure skating is weak without ethnic Russians,” Norris said. “… By reporting on Malinin and other figure skaters as well as the Russian athletes competing as neutrals, the Russian press is noting that there are Russians present in the Olympics.”
Originally published at Scott Reid