Titled Ukrainian track and field athlete Marina Bekh-Romanchuk shared her thoughts on Russian athletes promoting the propaganda of their terrorist country.
In athletics, support from Ukraine is strong at the level of the international federation. But recently Anna Ryzhikova was at the IOC Athletes’ Congress and said that this organization despises the position of Ukrainian athletes, and this personally demotivated her. Do you have any idea how to deal with this?
“I take this as negatively as possible – this is an abnormal and inadequate situation. We all understand well that every athlete is the face of his country. This is a person carrying a certain propaganda. The athlete has the opportunity to communicate with foreign media. And this is inadequate when athletes who do not speak out against war at all go to the civilized world and begin to communicate with the media. They say that they are offended, they were deprived of due to exclusion from competitions. But they sleep peacefully, train normally, don’t worry about anything, their families are at home. Nothing worries them, and the only problem is that they cannot go to international competitions. And this man will come to convey his opinion to foreigners.”
Will they be able to promote Russian propaganda through world sports?
“Certainly. The journalist will stand there and think: “Damn, maybe not everything is so simple, we can look at the medal from the other side.” And it’s very bad. Athletes of Ukrainian and international level make every effort to prevent this from happening: reposts, interviews. In my interviews, I constantly say that we are against this – we don’t want to compete with them and see them in our sector. Russians simply have no place in the civilized world during war. But Thomas Bach sees the whole situation in the context of the fact that sport brings peace and should unite us. I can’t imagine this, because sport is a big political driving force. It has always been this way and will continue to be so. Unfortunately, we will not change this in any way; athletes will never become people outside of politics. Athletes are political figures because they are the face of their country and represent the entire nation. Just as a president comes to negotiate with another president, we go to the world championships to negotiate with other sports people and fans. It’s just different levels.”
Earlier, the Diamond League announced the tournament schedule for the next season.
2023-10-08 13:55:49
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