MOSCOW, July 10. /TASS/. Russian athletes who have qualified for the 2024 Summer Olympics in France and received invitations should decide on their own whether they want to go to Paris or not, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.

According to him, decisions and agreements within sports federations must be respected.

"We are talking about individual decisions and each athlete makes a personal decision," Peskov told journalists in response to a question about the participation of invited Russian athletes in the 2024 IOC Summer Games.

"If speaking about athletes, who had the opportunity and did not go - every [sports] federation has its own circumstances, employs its own agreements, expresses its own collective opinion, makes its own collective decisions. This should be respected," Peskov said.

IOC’s regulations against Russia

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board convened for a meeting at the Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland, on March 19-20 and following the opening day it decided to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from taking part in the Parade of Athletes and also exclude them from the 2024 Olympics overall medal standings.

The IOC, however, ruled that Russian athletes, cleared to participate in the upcoming Olympics, would not have to sign anything denouncing their country’s special military operation in Ukraine.

On October 12, 2023, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) until further notice after the Russian organization included the Olympic councils of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions as its members.

The Swiss-based CAS registered on November 6, 2023 an appeal from the ROC against the IOC’s decision on the Russian governing Olympic body’s suspension.

The suspension means that the ROC cannot act as a national Olympic committee or receive financing from the Olympic movement. The IOC however reserved the right to clear Russian athletes to take part in the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 as neutrals. Later, IOC President Thomas Bach said that Russian athletes should have no affiliation with the ROC if they want to compete at the Olympic Games.

On July 9, the IOC reported that Russian freestyle wrestler Shamil Mamedov accepted the organization’s invitation to compete at the 2024 Paris Games. Russian tennis player Yelena Vesnina stated later in the day that she also accepted an invitation from the IOC to go to the French capital for the 2024 Summer Games.

On July 6, a source in the Russian Wrestling Federation (RWF) told TASS that All Russian wrestlers, who received invitations from the International Olympic Committee to compete at the Paris Games, rejected them. The team of Russian judokas earlier made the same decision.