Sebastian Coe, the head of World Athletics, on Friday said the organization is sticking to its long-held position that Russian athletes won't be allowed at the upcoming world championships and other big events until a peace settlement is reached in its war in Ukraine.
Track and field's hard-line stance is an outlier among Olympic sports, many of which allowed Russians to compete as neutral athletes at the Paris Olympics last year, and also at some world championships.
Russians have been almost completely absent from major international track meets for about a decade, dating to when they were sanctioned as the result of a doping scandal and the subsequent coverup that engulfed the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Not long after World Athletics lifted that ban in 2022, it enacted a new one related to Russia's then-recent invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s pretty obvious that we want a full contingent,” Coe said on the eve of world championships, when asked if there were any changes to the Russia policy. “We need a settled position. We need a peaceful agreement before we can move off that landscape.”
The world championships will feature about 2,000 athletes from 200 countries. They'll take place at Japan’s $1.4 billion National Stadium, which was built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Those Games were delayed a year by the pandemic and eventually held in Tokyo, but without fans.
At those Olympics, World Athletics granted only 10 spots for Russians who competed as “Authorized Neutral Athletes.” Among them was Maria Lasitskene, who won the gold medal in high jump, but has not competed in a major international event since.
“No, nothing has changed," Coe said about the policy. “I hope to God that it does change -- not just for athletics -- because it’s an unsustainable situation.”
