The International Olympic Committee will allow some individual athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete as neutral athletes at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February.
The IOC will use the same criteria as it did at the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024, where qualified individual athletes from those two countries were screened by a panel. Thirty two Russian or Belarusian athletes from 10 different sports were approved to compete as Individual Neutral Athletes (AIN) in Paris.
Teams of Russian or Belarusian athletes will not be allowed to compete.
“We fully believe in how things were delivered in Paris,” IOC president Kirsty Coventry told reporters on Friday from Italy, where Olympic officials toured several venues and held executive board meetings this week. “We had the discussion that we need to ensure fairness, of course, and other things are respected. So we decided that everything would remain the same.”
Eligibility criteria includes not actively supporting Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which started just days after the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and undergoing screening for ties to military or national security agencies. The approved athletes will compete under the Individual Neutral Athlete flag and won’t hear their country’s anthem played should they win a medal.
Swimmer Alina Zmushka was one of the athletes approved to compete under the Individual Neutral Athlete banner at the Paris Olympics in 2024. (Bernat Armangue/The Associated Press)
At least two sports federations, the International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation and the International Luge Federation, have already said they won’t allow Russian athletes to compete at the 2026 Games as neutral athletes.
The decision comes on the same day the IOC issued a statement expressing concern about several conflicts across the globe, the disruption of sports competition and “the boycotting and cancellation of competitions due to political tensions.” The IOC’s statement didn’t single out any particular conflict or country.
“Every single executive board member was taken back and saddened, really, when you look at the world and what is happening today, by the images that we see daily,” Coventry said.
The IOC announced Friday that its executive board has set up a working group “aimed at ensuring that the IOC, the Olympic Games and sport remain politically neutral and can uphold their mission to unite the world in peaceful competition.”
Coventry heading to UN summit
After Coventry was elected as the organization’s first female president in March, she promised she’d use diplomacy when dealing with an often unpredictable U.S. president, as that country prepares to welcome the world to Los Angeles for the Summer Olympics in 2028.
“When it comes to the U.S.A. and L.A., I have been dealing with, let’s say, difficult men in high positions since I was 20 years old,” Coventry said during her first press conference in March. “First and foremost, what I have learned is that communication will be key. That is something that will happen early on.”
Coventry and the IOC’s executive board toured progress on the Athletes’ Village for Olympic and Paralympic athletes during a visit to Italy this week. (Antonio Calanni/The Associated Press)
She said she believed that Donald Trump will want the L.A. Games to be successful, but emphasized the IOC would “not waver from our values” in the process.
Coventry officially took over the top job in June, and all eyes will be on the United Nations General Assembly summit next week in New York. That’s where Coventry may have her first opportunity to sit down in person with Trump.
“We have a number of heads of state scheduled in and pencilled in,” Coventry said.
Additional bodyweight categories added for weightlifting
The L.A. Olympics will feature two additional weightlifting bodyweight categories — one for women and one for men — to reduce “incentives for extreme weight reduction” and better align with the categories the sport uses in its world championships, Coventry also announced on Friday.
The sport’s quota hasn’t changed — 60 women and 60 men will compete in six bodyweight categories per gender, with a total of 10 weightlifters per event.
“The lifters’ representatives estimated that a higher number of bodyweight categories would provide a more balanced gap between each of them, thus minimising the possible health impact and injury risk on the athletes,” the International Weightlifting Federation said in a statement on Friday.
Questions remain on ice hockey rink’s timeline
One of the venues on the IOC’s tour this week was the rebuilt sliding centre that local organizers had championed against the wishes of the IOC, according to reporting from The Associated Press.
The sliding centre project was targeted by vandals last year. The backup plan, should the sliding centre not be finished on time, was not ideal: luge, bobsled and skeleton athletes would have had to compete in Lake Placid, N.Y., far away from the heart of the Games.
“We had issues with the sliding center,” Kristin Kloster, head of the IOC’s coordination commission for the Milan-Cortina Games, said earlier this week. “We thought the timeline was too short, and also we thought that the legacy benefit from the new sliding centre would probably not meet the expectations that we wanted.
“Having said all that, the decision from the national authorities in Italy to create a sliding centre … has surpassed our expectations: they have delivered on time, the sliding [centre] has been tested by athletes already and I think it’s all going really, really well. So I’m impressed with the work.”
The under-construction Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena is pictured from above in March 2025. Once completed, it will host many of the men’s Olympic hockey games and the semifinal and final games of women’s Olympic hockey. It will also be home to Para hockey during the Paralympic Games. (Claudio Villa/Getty Images)
Milan-Cortina organizers said earlier this year that the timeline would be tight. If all goes to schedule, organizers won’t be able to get into the new building to start creating temporary ice until October.
That would see the ice completed in December, and then tested less than two months before the opening of the Games.
Milan-Cortina CEO Andrea Varnier indicated earlier this week that the timeline is still quite tight. He said the venue will be finished “very close to the Games.”
“We know that there are very tight deadlines, we are monitoring it and we are rightly nervous because the timings are very important,” he said. “For now they are all in the plan we imagined.”
Varnier said in March that organizers didn’t see a need for a backup plan for the arena.