TALLINN – Watching the Paris Olympics will be difficult for most people in Russia — and in the view of its media, it’s not really worth the effort.
Only 15 Russian citizens will be competing in the Games and, in principle, they won’t be representing Russia. Because Russia and neighboring Belarus were banned from fielding national teams because of the war in Ukraine, Russian and Belarusian athletes approved to compete will be doing so as neutrals.
Russians have been intense Olympics fans since the days when the Soviet Union’s sports prowess was nicknamed “The Big Red Machine.” But with so few of their countrymen competing, Russia’s state TV channels aren’t broadcasting any of the events. Russians may find feeds online, but could need a virtual private network to circumvent the country’s block of some channels.
The last time the Olympics weren’t on TV in Russia — which has won the second-largest number of medals, counting the Soviet era — was in 1984, when the Soviet Union boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
State news channel Rossiya 24 did broadcast a report from Paris on the opening ceremony Friday night, showing dancing and plumes of colored smoke rising over the Seine River. News agencies Tass and RIA-Novosti gave it glancing attention, with terse stories saying the opening ceremony had begun, but little detail other than noting the rain drove many spectators away.
Newspapers aren’t ignoring the Olympics entirely, but their main approach has been to accentuate the negative, writing at length about crime in Paris, the inconvenience of barricades placed throughout the city and reported food shortages for athletes.
“The Paris Olympics is an amazing event, if not to say a phenomenon: Competitions in individual disciplines have just just started, the opening ceremony has not even taken place, and so many scandals have already accumulated that they will be enough for several Games,” Sovietsky Sport newspaper reporter Alexander Shulgin wrote Thursday.
“I think that this Olympics will go down in history with a completely negative result,” the newspaper Sport-Ekspress quoted Irina Rodnina, a three-time figure skating gold winner and now a member of the Russian parliament, as saying.
A whiff of schadenfreude floats through many of the stories. Writing about the fences and barriers erected in Paris, Sovietsky Sport’s Andrei Tupikov said: “Once upon a time, everyone pointed their finger at the structure of sports competitions in Russia. Many did not like the fact that before any mass events there were too many different fences and barriers around the arenas and stadiums. … In our reality the practice is slowly fading away, but in Europe it is being actively adopted.”
Shulgin, seemingly smarting from criticism about the facilities at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, suggested Paris may face an opening ceremony embarrassment similar to Sochi’s, when a display of the Olympic rings malfunctioned.
“If the ring did not open in Sochi, it’s scary to imagine what could happen in Paris,” he wrote, but did not follow up after the ceremony.
No such disaster occurred, but Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Saturday compared Paris unfavorably to Sochi.
“The Western media did not like (stray) dogs at the Sochi Games. In Paris, they were smiled at by the rats that flooded the city streets,” she said in a statement. She also called the opening ceremony “ridiculous.”
Commentary on the Paris Games also verged into ethical and philosophical questions, such as whether one should root for the few Russians participating despite the national team’s exclusion. To receive approval from the International Olympic Committee, the athletes cannot have demonstrated support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among other stipulations.
Sport-Ekspress commentator Oleg Shamonaev analyzed the connotations of each word in the Individual Neutral Athlete designation and concluded: “The 15 ‘neutrals’ with a Russian passport who did not change their flag, despite 2 1/2 years of sanctions … are worthy not of condemnation but of respect.”
“It’s stupid to pretend we don’t care about what happens to them at the 2024 Games,” he said.
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