IOC boss Thomas Bach has left the FDP. This is reported by the “Augsburger Allgemeine” (Friday). However, the sports official’s exit from the party is said to have nothing to do with the dispute over Russia’s return to world sports. “Thomas Bach’s personal decision matured over the years and is not related to the current sports-political debate,” said a spokesman for Bach.
At the beginning of February, the chairwoman of the Defense Committee in the Bundestag, the FDP MP Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann and the chairwoman of the Young Liberals Franziska Brandmann had a naive attitude towards the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in a guest article for the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. held against Russia. The FDP politicians criticized that the IOC boss failed to recognize that athletes in Russia were a central instrument of propaganda.
The IOC is striving for a return of athletes from Russia and Belarus to the international sports stage under a neutral flag – provided they clearly commit themselves to the Olympic Charter and do not actively support the war in Ukraine. IOC President Thomas Bach, Olympic fencing champion in 1976, had said that an exclusion “because of a passport or place of birth” violated the ban on discrimination.
