BUCHAREST, July 30. /TASS/. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris last week is just a tiny part of the failure of the Olympics in France, Romanian news website solidnews.ro reported on Tuesday.
"The opening ceremony… was just the tip of the iceberg encompassing the moral and sporting disaster that is the 2024 Paris Olympics," according to the portal.
"The obvious problem, which no one wants to talk about, is the exclusion of Russian athletes," the portal continued in its article. "Such an exclusion was previously registered only once in the history of the Olympics, at the 1936 Games, which were organized by the Nazi Party and inaugurated by Adolf Hitler."
"Having excluded Russia, the collective West has adopted Nazi practices that fly in the face of the basic principles of the Olympic Movement," according to solidnews.ro.
"The results of some sports competitions are fraudulent," the Romanian web portal noted. "For instance, in judo, where six weight categories have already wrestled, no podium would look the same had Russian athletes competed..., this goes for many other sports competitions…, where the situation is the same."
"Because Russian athletes were kept out of [the Olympics], numerous sports competitions became weaker, and what’s more, their eventual results are not even genuine anymore," the Romanian web portal noted.
"What about Israel, which keeps bombing Lebanon while its national athletes participate in the [2024] Games? Why have the Russians been barred and the Israelis haven’t? And the Belarusians? What did they do wrong?"
According to solidnews.ro, the world must either return to the basic principles of Olympism or ditch them altogether.
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games are hosted by the French capital of Paris between July 26 and August 11.
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.