IOC member: No Taliban flag at the Olympics in Paris
Kristin Kloster, a Norwegian member of the IOC's executive committee, says 11 athletes from Russia and Belarus so far are qualified for the 2024 Olympics, and that a team of Afghan athletes will compete at the Games without the Taliban flag.
Even though Russia and Belarus are at war with Ukraine, the IOC has allowed qualified athletes from the two warring countries to participate in this summer's Olympic Games in Paris on the condition that the athletes are approved by both their international federations and the IOC.
At the closing session of Play the Game 2024 in Trondheim about the role of Olympic Games and the IOC in major world conflicts, Norwegian IOC Executive Board member Kristin Kloster said that so far six Russians and five Belarusians have qualified for the Games through their federations.
But Kristin Kloster also said that the 11 qualified athletes from the two countries will only be allowed to compete at the Olympics as individual neutral athletes if they also pass the IOC's test of whether they have supported the two countries' war in Ukraine.
Afghan NOC in exile select an Olympic team
The Norwegian IOC member also said at the conference that the IOC is negotiating with Afghanistan's former National Olympic Committee to select an Afghan team for the Paris Games.
The committee members have been living in exile since August 2021, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and banned Afghan women from playing sports.
When one of Afghanistan's first female Olympic athletes, judoka Friba Rezayee, who attended the conference in Norway, asked whether the Afghan team would march into the Olympic Stadium in Paris under the Taliban flag, Kristin Kloster replied that it would not happen.
At the conference, however, the Norwegian IOC member did not address the status of the IOC's year-long negotiations with the Taliban's national sports leaders in Kabul to lift the regime's religious ban on all women's sports in Afghanistan.
The IOC has turned a blind eye to the Taliban's ban on women's sports for two and a half years, even though the religiously motivated ban is in direct violation of the IOC's rules in the Olympic Charter, which prohibits gender discrimination.
At the IOC Session in Mumbai, India, in October 2023, where IOC members approved the committee's new Olympic human rights strategy, IOC Director James Macleod explained the Olympic double standard in Afghanistan as 'a very complex situation'.
At the same time, Macleod emphasised that there had been 'a tiny bit of progress' in the IOC's negotiations with the Taliban, which made it relevant for the IOC to continue trying to persuade the armed rulers in Kabul to end their years-long religious war against sportswomen in Afghanistan.
