Everywhere you look in sports these days, Russians are disappearing. The international governing bodies for basketball, soccer and hockey—FIBA, FIFA and the IIHF—banned Russian teams from competition in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Wimbledon has boxed out Russian players. Even the International Cat Federation has forbidden any feline bred in Russia from entering international competition, citing Russia’s “unprecedented act of aggression.”
In our polarized modern discourse, complex topics tend to get chopped into two sides, and so the Russia issue in sports has been simplified: To ban or not to ban, that is the question.
Photo Illustration by Bryce Wood; Robert Deutsch/USA Today Sports (Valieva); Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports (Medvedev); George Walker IV/USA Today Sports (Slepyshev); VCG/VCG/Getty Images (Vorontsevich); Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images (Putin)
