Knockout games: Russian sports returned a hundred years ago

The previous time OCD was disqualified was six years ago, on December 5, 2017. The reason was doping violations. But that excommunication did not last long: already on February 28, 2018, after doping tests taken from Russian athletes who competed at the 2018 Winter Olympics gave a negative result, the Russian Olympic Committee was restored to its rights.

The current reason is much more serious. The reason for the disqualification is the inclusion of the Olympic Councils of the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions in the ROC. According to the official statement of the IOC, this “violates the territorial integrity of the NOC (National Olympic Committee – “MK”) of Ukraine.”

Formally, the current disqualification is also temporary: ROC membership is suspended “until further notice.” It is clear, however, that this time we will have to wait much longer for notification. And it’s not a fact that we’ll wait at all. In any case, there are no firm guarantees. But this is not the first time that Russian sport finds itself in such a situation. Let us recall that the USSR Olympic Committee was created and recognized by the IOC only in 1951 – in the 34th year of the existence of Soviet power.

Actually, it was precisely these 33 years with “kopecks” that the break continued. Until 1918, the domestic part of the Olympic movement was represented by the Russian Olympic Committee, created six years earlier, in 1912. More precisely, it was established earlier, in 1911, but the final legal point was reached only a year later – after the government approved the charter of the ROC. At the same time, the ROC was officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee.

By the way, the cause of red tape is partly similar to current OCD problems. The fact is that five years earlier, in 1907, the IOC recognized the Finnish Olympic Committee (it was created back in 1903), despite the fact that the Grand Duchy of Finland was an integral part of the Russian Empire.

There was quite a heated debate in the government on this issue, reflected in the Special Journal of the Council of Ministers. According to this source, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted that the Finnish Olympic Committee be recognized as a local branch of the Russian Committee, not enjoying the rights of an independent member of the IOC. Which, among other efforts, required adjustments to the ROC charter. In short, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested not to rush into approval, but to first deal with Finnish sports separatism.

But in this case, the Russian Olympic team would not be able to fully participate in the next Olympic Games (held in Stockholm from July 6 to July 27, 1912). So in the end it was decided to approve the charter, turning a blind eye to the “Finnish question”. Well, almost closed. The Swedish government’s promise “to not allow Finland to participate independently in the Olympic Games, but to give it a common place with Russia, under the same letter “R”, was taken into account.”

Soviet Russia, as we know, did not become the successor to the pre-Soviet one, so the place of the collapsed Russian Empire in the international Olympic movement remained unoccupied. More precisely, for some time he was occupied by the ghost of the empire: from 1910 to 1933, until his death, a member of the IOC from Russia was Prince Lev Urusov – a diplomat and athlete, the country’s tennis champion, who left his homeland after the Bolsheviks came to power.

Here, too, by the way, one cannot help but see certain parallels with modern times. As is known, despite the disqualification of the ROC, the Russian members of the International Olympic Committee, Elena Isinbayeva and Shamil Tarpishchev, were not expelled from it and do not intend to be expelled. “The IOC Ethics Commission checked these two members, the conclusion is that neither Isinbayeva nor Tarpishchev have a contractual relationship with the Russian army, they did not support the conflict in Ukraine,” said IOC President Thomas Bach.

It is unlikely that Prince Urusov had much to do with the IOC after the revolution, but he did not sit idle at all. Before the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, the first after the end of the World War (originally it was supposed to be held in Berlin in 1916), Lev Vladimirovich proposed allowing the Russian national team, formed from emigrants, to participate in the games. But the idea did not receive support.

And before the next Olympics, the Paris Olympics (1924), the prince went even further. This is how Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games and the then president of the IOC, described in his “Olympic Memoirs” the consideration of Urusov’s initiative at the IOC Rome session (April 1923): “Not without emotion we heard our colleague Prince Leon Urusov, a former diplomat , described the fate of his compatriots, divided into two parts, to whom he, with complete liberalism, asked to be given equal rights to participate in the Games in Paris; both Soviet teams and teams of emigrant sports clubs were to be accepted on equal terms.”

Coubertin wrote that he always regretted the way his proposal was received and that it was rejected for “administrative” reasons. No one was more aware than I of the practical difficulties, or perhaps the intractable problems, that might arise from this, but the IOC would have made itself famous if it had treated the proposal differently and, at the right moment, forwarded it to the French government, backed by encouraging comments.

The “administrative” reasons were, of course, actually political. White emigrants could no longer speak for the country; the country they represented no longer existed. But Soviet athletes could not yet: the USSR had not yet appeared on the Olympic map of the world. As on the vast majority of political maps: there were only once, twice, and miscalculated states that recognized the Soviet Union. Almost literally.

However, blaming the IOC for isolating the young Country of Soviets is still not entirely fair. Rather, it was self-isolation. This is evidenced, for example, by the following fact: despite the decision of the IOC, the French Olympic Committee really wanted to see Soviet athletes at the 1924 Olympics. The corresponding invitation was officially sent to the main Soviet sports authority at that time – the Supreme Council of Physical Culture. But Soviet sports officials responded to this with a categorical refusal.

In the young Country of the Soviets, the Olympic Games were not favored, considering them purely bourgeois fun. “Bourgeois physical culture, and in particular the international Olympic movement, was considered an outdated legacy of the past, contrary to the ideas of the international communist movement,” writes Boris Goloshchapov in his “History of Physical Culture and Sports.”

And then, to put it mildly, they were wary of sports as such in the USSR – for the same reasons. “It reached the point of absurdity,” writes Goloshchapov. “For example, in 1925, an article was published on the pedagogical essence of football, which proved that this game, since it is an invention of the English bourgeoisie, teaches Soviet youth to deceive, that, they say, a feint is a deception , and therefore, it (feint) negatively affects the personal qualities of those involved in this sport. Instead of “bourgeois exercises”, “labor gymnastics” was recommended, i.e. imitative forms of working movements (raking coal, sawing, planing, etc.) “.

But gradually the revolutionary frenzy subsided, and the sport was rehabilitated. Well, with the exception of the “bourgeois Olympics”, which in the USSR were still treated with strong antipathy. More precisely, with class hatred. Which, in turn, found a full response from the “bourgeoisie” from the IOC: the dislike was completely mutual. The international Olympic movement and sports in the USSR developed in parallel, non-intersecting paths.

The Soviet Union followed the path of “import substitution”. The replacement for the IOC was the Red Sports International (RSI), created in 1921 under the auspices of the Comintern. Its headquarters were, naturally, located in Moscow. “In contrast to the Olympic Games of bourgeois-capitalist countries, the Red Sports International organizes International Workers’ Sports Festivals (Spartakiads), which aim to promote physical culture as a means of improving the health of the proletariat and the class education of the working masses,” an encyclopedic reference book published in the USSR in 1932.

In total, the Red Sports Intern held four Olympiads – three summer and one winter. Of these, only one took place outside the USSR, the winter one – in 1928 in Oslo. An attempt to hold the International Workers’ Spartakiad in Berlin in 1931 ended in failure: the Social Democratic government banned the event.

It should be noted that the KSI was not the only alternative to the “bourgeois” Olympic movement. The Red Sports International had a serious and, perhaps, more successful competitor – the Socialist Workers Sports International, better known in Russian historiography as the Lucerne Sports International (LSI), created in 1920 by European Social Democrats.

For a long time, both alternatives to the IOC could not stand each other. “The unity of LSI and KSI was manifested only in the fact that both of these organizations boycotted the “bourgeois” Olympic Games and contrasted them with their own international competitions – the workers’ sports Olympics,” Goloshchapov clarifies. But in the end, against the backdrop of the strengthening of the position of fascism in Europe, the “sportinterns” made peace.

In 1937, the III Summer Workers’ Olympics was held in Antwerp, organized jointly by the Lucerne Sports International and the KSI. This holiday of “working sports” can be considered the pinnacle of the development of an alternative version of the Olympic movement.

But even at its peak, Soviet sport was largely stewing in its own juices. Which didn’t lead to anything good. “The limited contact of Soviet athletes and scientific specialists with the international sports movement did not contribute to either the development of theory or the improvement of the practice of physical culture and sports,” writes Boris Goloshchapov. “The level of USSR records in the 20-30s is significantly inferior to the results of medalists of the Olympic Games and championships peace.”

The Second World War changed everything. Neither the Red nor the Lucerne sports internationals survived it. And the IOC not only survived this storm, but also became much closer to the USSR. At the end of 1950, the All-Union Committee for Physical Culture and Sports under the Council of Ministers of the USSR received a letter from the President of the International Olympic Committee, Swede Sigfried Edström, in which Soviet athletes were invited to participate in the 52 Olympics. This, in fact, became the reason for the creation, or rather, the re-creation of the national Olympic committee. This happened on April 23, 1951.

Two weeks later, on May 7, 1951, IOC members voted to recognize the USSR NOC. And a year later, our Olympic team went to Helsinki, the first Olympic Games in the history of Soviet sports, taking second place there in the number of medals.

In general, this story has a happy ending. But it’s very long. Not all of its participants managed to live to see the happy ending. Well, as the wise Korney Chukovsky rightly said: “You have to live in Russia for a long time, then something will work out.” Wait and see.