There will be two Russian athletes at the Milano Cortina Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee said Thursday that three independent neutral athletes, all figure skaters, are eligible to compete at the Winter Olympics in February. Adeliia Petrosiant and Petr Gumennik are Russian and the third, Viktoriya Safonova, is from Belarus.
The three will be identified at the Games as ‘AIN,’ which is the French translation for Independent Neutral Athlete, and will not be allowed to wear their country’s colors or have their flag.
The IOC’s announcement comes two months after IOC President Kirsty Coventry said some Russian and Belarussian athletes would be allowed to participate in Milano Cortina, just as they were at the Summer Games in Paris last year. Russia and Belarus have been banned by the IOC since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but the individual sports are allowed to decide for themselves whether athletes from the two countries can compete as neutral individuals.
Many of the winter sport federations have maintained their bans of Russian and Belarussian athletes. Figure skating is one that has allowed neutral athletes to compete, saying Russia and Belarus could send one athlete in each discipline to Milano Cortina if they qualified.
Petrosiant and Gumennik earned their spots by winning the final Olympic qualifier, held in September in Beijing. Safonova was fourth at the same event. The three then had to be approved by the Individual Neutral Athlete Eligibility Review Panel, which verified there was no record of them supporting the invasion of Ukraine or the Russian Army and that they were in compliance with all anti-doping requirements.
Petrosiant’s presence in Milano Cortina is sure to raise some eyebrows because she is coached by Eteri Tutberidze. Tutberidze also coached Kamila Valieva, who was at the center of a doping scandal at the Beijing Olympics.
