Russia’s tricolour has returned to Olympic competition. At the opening ceremony of the Youth Olympic Games in Diamniadio on Saturday 31 October, a 13-strong Russian delegation walked in under its national flag and will hear the Russian anthem when its athletes win, the first time either has been permitted at any Olympic event since the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Games.
The thaw was set in motion in July, when the International Olympic Committee provisionally lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and withdrew its blanket recommendation that international federations treat Russians as neutral athletes. The flag and anthem ban for the Los Angeles 2028 Games is still in force. At the Youth Games, individual sports governing bodies decide, and most have cleared the Russian delegation to compete with full national symbols.
World Athletics remains the holdout, keeping Russian track and field athletes locked out. The international federations for judo and swimming have gone the other way, clearing Russian competitors to compete with full national symbols.
Coventry defends political neutrality
Kirsty Coventry, elected IOC president in 2025, used her welcome speech to frame the Games as a historic African moment. On the Russia question she has been firm that sport must not be weaponised.
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“Athletes can only inspire us if they are able to compete. They can only do so if we keep sport strictly neutral ground, if politics does not take over on the field of play,” she told reporters ahead of the Games, according to TheNational.
That line is almost a mirror image of the position taken by the government in Kyiv.
Ukraine rejects the IOC’s reasoning
Ukraine’s sports minister Matviy Bidnyi has rejected the IOC’s reasoning in blunt terms.
“Any conversation about returning Russian athletes to the international arena can only happen after the war ends, a just peace is established, every single abducted Ukrainian child is returned home, and international law is fully restored. Until that moment, isolation is not political, it is a matter of basic human decency,” Bidnyi told TheNational.
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Ukraine has not boycotted the Games. Its public broadcaster has refused to carry the ceremonies, citing the presence of Russian and Belarusian teenagers marching under their national flags.
Putin pushes for a football return
Russia has treated Dakar as a template. Sports minister Mikhail Degtyarev told the young delegation before they left for Senegal that “after your victories, and I’m sure there will be some, the Russian anthem will be played and the Russian flag will be raised,” according to reporting from Senegal.
Vladimir Putin has pushed to extend the opening to football, using a state sports forum in Krasnoyarsk to press international federations to end the remaining bans. FIFA president Gianni Infantino said in February that the four-year exclusion “has not achieved anything” and has signalled he wants Russian youth teams back first; FIFA has since cleared Russia to take part in the Under-15 World Cup.
The 2,700 athletes competing in Dakar will contest 25 sports through 13 November across sites in Diamniadio, Dakar and Saly. Senegal is the first African country to host an official Olympic event.
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