Bronze medal-winning Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak got low marks from the athletic community for wearing the letter Z on his leotard while standing next to a gold medal-winning Ukrainian tumbler at the Artistic Gymnastics World Cup in Qatar.
Z is the symbol scrawled across the exterior of armored vehicles being used by Russian troops in their ongoing invasion of Ukraine. It’s believed the Russians are marking vehicles with that symbol to tell them apart from the Ukrainian vehicles with which they are at war. Z is a letter that doesn’t exist in the Cyrillic Russian alphabet.
Kuliak’s statement was met with widespread disdain on social media. According to a translation by Yahoo! Sports, 2016 Olympics gold medal-winning Ukrainian gymnast Oleg Verniaiev used the incident to show support for the decision of several international sporting organizations’ banning of Russian athletes.
“Of course, you will excuse me, but let the Russians not shout that sport is out of politics,” Verniaiev wrote on Instagram.
Due to a massive misinformation campaign aided by state-funded television in Russia, Russians are being falsely told that President Vladimir Putin’s forces are freeing Ukraine from a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”
Ukraine’s democratically elected president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.
The International Gymnastics Federation called Kuliak’s gesture “shocking” and told British news outlet The Guardian that it could lead to the revocation of 20-year-old gymnast’s bronze medal.
Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the International Tennis Federation, International Paralympic Committee, Formula 1 racing and other sporting organizations have taken measures to exclude Russia from international competition.
