Olympics 2024: “If no Palestinians qualify”, the IOC will invite them, the president declares

Barlamane.com
|

15.40 – 27 April 2024

Palestinian athletes should be “six to eight” at the Paris Olympics, where the International Olympic Committee will invite them if they fail to qualify, President Thomas Bach said Friday in an exclusive interview with AFP.

“We have given a clear commitment that if no athlete qualifies on the field, the Palestinian National Olympic Committee (NOC) will benefit from invitations,” the leader said. When asked about the extent of these invitations, he estimated the number of Palestinian representatives at “six or eight” in Paris depending on the results of the qualifications, “which are still ongoing in a certain number of disciplines”.

The Olympic invitation system is not reserved for Palestinians, but for any NOC that fails to qualify athletes, in the name of “Olympic universality” that allows gathering all nations, beyond just the sports elite.

But the arrival of Palestinian athletes in Paris remained a big question since the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, after the attack launched by Hamas on October 7, notably destroyed most of the sports infrastructure.

Thomas Bach received the president of the Palestinian NOC, Jibril Rajoub, last week in Lausanne, promising to continue the IOC’s support for the athletes, but also to ensure the coordination of international efforts to rebuild the destroyed installations.

If the leader of Olympism from the start of the conflict between Israel and Hamas called for “a peaceful solution”, he also adopted a treatment very different from the Russian war in Ukraine, which resulted in a series of sanctions against Russian sports.

The IOC hides behind its “two-state solution”, since the Israeli and Palestinian NOCs have existed since 1995, a legacy of the Oslo peace process. Furthermore, “there has been no violation of the Olympic Charter, either by the Israeli committee or by the Palestinian committee,” Thomas Bach insisted on Friday, while the Russian NOC had placed regional sports organizations under its control.

(With AFP)