The Paralympic torch left its home in Stoke Mandeville this week and has arrived at the gateway to the Dolomites. The towns of Bolzano and Trento will host “flame festivals” over the weekend to welcome the Paralympic movement and commemorate its progress on the 50th anniversary of the first Winter Games. It will be a joyous, poignant start to what could be a fractious fortnight.
While the flame is being passed between torch bearers, the leaders of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) will be scrambling to contain what increasingly resembles a diplomatic incident. A decision last week to invite 10 Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete at the Winter Paralympics at Milano Cortina has been met with full-throated criticism from across Europe and beyond.
Ukraine led with a typically unsparing response from its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who called the IPC’s decision “dirty”, “not respectable” and “not European from the point of values”. His criticism has been echoed by other European politicians, including Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, who issued a statement on Tuesday calling for the IPC to reverse their action. The UK’s culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has called it “completely the wrong decision”. The European commissioner for sport, Glenn Micallef, has said he will boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in protest.
The focus of frustration at Russian inclusion is now directed at next Friday’s opening ceremony in the Verona Arena, with a growing likelihood it will be marked by an absence of the very athletes who will determine the success of the Games. Ukraine will send no athletes or officials, while the Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland and Finland are also expected to join any boycott. More countries, while not expressly protesting, have also said their athletes will stay away and that their flags will be carried into the arena by volunteers. Great Britain will be among that number.
ParalympicsGB say they have never boycotted a Games and do not intend to. They cite the scheduling of events, with alpine skiing beginning early in the morning after the opening ceremony 150 miles (241km) away in Cortina, as the reason for their reduced representation. British parasport executives will still be in the arena, as will politicians from the Trump administration, though not JD Vance on this occasion, while the IPC notes that similar scheduling problems prompted a reduced turnout at the opening ceremony in Beijing four years ago. Whether these arguments will be persuasive remains to be seen, however, if spectators end up watching an opening ceremony shorn of the very people they have come to see.
A ban on Russian and Belarusian participation in Paralympic sport was announced by the IPC in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. It was amended just a year later, with individuals allowed to compete at the 2024 Paris Games as “neutral athletes”. Last year, IPC member countries went further, submitting a motion at the general assembly that called for an end to the ban altogether. That motion was passed straightforwardly with given reasons for a change in policy ranging from a desire to separate politics from sport to a belief that the treatment of Russia had been inconsistent with that afforded Israel after its war in Gaza.
While the lifting of the ban was subsequently rejected by a number of Paralympic sporting bodies who control participation at the Games, a Russian appeal to the court of arbitration for sport forced the International Ski and Snowboard Federation to comply with the IPC’s ruling. Six bipartite invitations to Russian athletes who clear the competitive criteria were sent out last week, believed to include Alexey Bugaev, a three-time Paralympic champion in alpine skiing, and the cross-country skiers Ivan Golubkov and Anastasiia Bagiian, who have both won medals at world level.
The president of the IPC, Andrew Parsons, has spent the past week trying to persuade the Paralympic community to stick together. “I hope the ceremony is not politicised,” he said at a media event in Milan, insisting there were “different ways and spaces to send messages and express views freely”. He was forced to admit, however, that he was “deeply disappointed” at the prospect of a boycott.
As an organisation, the IPC has largely managed to steer clear of the thorny complexities of geopolitics, but no longer. The irony being that, under Parsons, the Paralympics has become a necessary platform for the advocacy of disability rights. This year’s Winter Games will be the biggest yet, with Portugal, El Salvador, Haiti and North Macedonia competing for the first time.
There are more events this year too and a genuine hope that the success of the Winter Olympics will bring new eyes to disability sport. From the USA’s summer and winter medal-winning phenomenon Oksana Masters, to Italy’s master of alpine skiing events, Giacomo Bertagnolli, and Britain’s Menna Fitzpatrick who, like Lindsey Vonn, will compete in the downhill just months after serious injury, there will be heroines and champions aplenty. To make the most of its opportunities, however, the Games must first get past its challenges.
