Who else is tired of Olympic athlete bans and country boycotts?

Athlete bans? Country boycotts? Yup, another Olympic Games must be around the corner.

Don’t look now, but indications are strong we’ll be bombarded by continuing talk of athlete bans — perhaps even threats of a boycott — leading up to the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.

Bans and boycotts, unfortunately, are as much of part of Olympic tradition over the past 60-plus years as doping scandals, sweeping top-level corruption, and rigged host-city bidding processes.

This week, a group of European countries together urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to extend its sanction against athletes from Russia and Belarus through next summer’s Paris Games.

In February 2022 the IOC, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with Belarusian assistance, banned those two countries as well as their athletes from IOC competition.

The IOC now, however, is pursuing a means that would allow athletes from those two countries to compete in Paris as unaffiliated neutrals. The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) earlier this month said it is “open” to backing the IOC in this pursuit.

But not Poland. Nor Great Britain. Nor other Baltic nations.

“We strongly believe that now is not the time to consider the opening up of a pathway for Russian and Belarusian athletes to return to the Olympic Games in any status,” Poland’s foreign ministry said in a statement, jointly issued Monday along with Great Britain, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Two weeks ago Germany’s Olympic committee similarly announced its opposition to athletes from Russia or Belarus competing in Paris in any manner, for the same reason.

The U.S. last month said it has “strong concerns” about the feasibility of permitting athletes from those two warring nations from competing as neutrals at the 2024 Games.

No country is threatening a boycott of next year’s Games. Hopefully, it won’t get anywhere close to that.

The whole point of the modern Olympic movement, begun in 1896, was to show that the world’s countries could compete in various sports peacefully, and without reference to political differences, etc.

Has any country ever been shamed enough by an Olympic boycott, or athlete ban, into ending a war prematurely, or killing a policy deemed unacceptably abhorrent outside that country (such as Apartheid)?

Today, 127 years later, the IOC has taken that original mantra, sifted it through myriad marketing, legal, HR and corporate strainers and re-baked it as follows:

“The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”

How does banning any athletes from an athletic, supposedly apolitical competition further any of those causes? Especially when nowhere has an IOC mission statement said, demanded or even implied that athletes from countries that have instigated a current or recent war should be excluded.

Nor should they be. Yet sometimes such bans apply anyway.

Similarly, from 1956-88 countries banded together to boycott a Summer Games for various political reasons — in particular, eight nations in 1956 (in Melbourne), three in 1964 (Tokyo), 34 African nations in 1976 (Montreal), 66 mostly democratic nations in 1980 (Moscow), 18 communist nations in 1984 (Los Angeles), and seven in 1988 (Seoul).

Of course, boycotts are selective. Not every war instigator has had its athletes banned from an Olympic Games — e.g., the U.S. over the Vietnam War.

IOC president Thomas Bach last week said the Olympic movement cannot be “referees” in global political disputes.

Right on.

Although sports’ five-ring circus never fails to disappoint in some manner, on this issue maybe it’s right for a change. Open up this hornets’ nest, and what’ll happen at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles? Ugh.

Nobody wants 1980 and 1984 all over again.

JoKryk@postmedia.com

@JohnKryk