Three Shells and a Pea game

How the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has turned into an International Committee of Cheaters and Scammers

Sitting down at the gambling table with an opponent who not only has nine aces in one deck but also keeps changing the rules ten times per game, expecting to win is fairly naïve. Expecting that the opponent will display decency and conscientiousness is no less naïve, either. It is far better to have nothing to do with scoundrels and unscrupulous people at all, and even more so, never get involved in gambling with them.  Cheating and brazen shell game has become in recent years the hallmark of the International Olympic Committee, which is ready to break athletes’ fates like twigs with conspicuous sadistic pleasure. The IOC threw the Olympic Charter into the trash bin as not wanted long ago and replaced it, for its own purposes and convenience, with a much more relevant manual A Million and One Ways to Lie, Be a Hypocrite and Cheat. It is high time to change the signboard altogether. After all, the IOC has long turned into an exemplary Committee of Cheaters and Scammers. 

Frankly speaking, after the initial shock, confusion and childish resentment caused by the IOC’s decisions to reject Belarusian athletes one by one and bar them from participating in the Paris 2024 Olympics, there have appeared anger and a desire to crush the sports officials’ well-groomed shameless faces. After all, this is not the way it should be done. However, it is worth being angry with ourselves, too — for naivety, faith and hope. It was a bad idea to believe them since they know no compassion, nor affection, nor sympathy. They lured us to the Olympics like to a piece of delicacy, forcing us to dance in the arena to their lousy music, just to reward us not with sugar candy but with a public kick. There is no doubt that this is exactly what was intended.  
The IOC had been pretending to show generosity and innocence for a long time, but now the masks have finally been dropped. At first, Belarusian athletes were deprived of state symbols and national identity, and were made to perform in a faceless uniform, like outcasts. Then the IOC took away the opportunity to compete in team sports, and in any competition where more than one athlete is expected to take part. Along with that, international tournaments were opened for Belarusian athletes on conditions of severe discrimination, and representatives of our country did not have any rights there — the organisers decided themselves whether to ‘execute or pardon’, whether to allow Belarusian athletes to perform or turn them down without any explanation. The Belarusian side endured patiently all sorts of discrimination and lived in the hope of winning Olympic licences and getting to Paris, where our athletes could deliver their best performances. However, being carried away by the Three Shells and a Pea game, we failed to notice that the pea had gone missing from the gambling table long ago and there was no way to win in that cheating game.      
Surprisingly, World Athletics turned out to be the most honest amid the ongoing chaos and mayhem of lawlessness. This organisation did not try to beat about the bush and announced their categorical ‘no’ to the participation of Belarusian and Russian track-and-field athletes in competitions under the auspices of the World Athletics Association. No illusions. The International Canoe Federation (ICF) did not particularly shy away from the answer either, and barricaded the way to obtaining Olympic licences for those who never hid their political views and had real chances to win gold medals at the Olympics. Dossiers thick as bricks were compiled for Maryna Litvinchuk and Volha Khudzenka, the main compromising material in which contained the girls’ words about their love and pride for their country. According to the IOC, such statements are absolutely out of the question today. 


The circus that has been happening in recent days simply does not fit into any framework of consciousness of a mentally healthy person, whose brain is not infected with the rhetoric of Western liberalism. The IOC commission of biased non-professionals randomly assembled and endowed with God knows what rights brazenly expels from the Belarusian Olympic delegation all those who have managed to honestly win tickets to Paris in that hellish fight and counted to secure medals there. The sports officials just shut the door on Belarusian athletes’ aspirations without explaining the reason, without the right of appeal, in an insulting, harsh and cynical way, driven by an emphatic desire to humiliate and sting as painfully as possible. All wrestlers, but one, have been sent to the political guillotine, including Tokyo 2020 Olympics medallists Mahamedkhabib Kadzimahamedau, Iryna Kurachkina and Vanesa Kaladzinskaya. A barrier has been put in the way of two Belarusian weightlifters, a representative of taekwondo and shooting. All Belarusian pentathletes have been illegally barred from participating in the Paris 2024 Olympics, including the favourites of the women’s tournament — the experienced pentathlete, Anastasiya Prokopenko, and a young and promising pentathlete, Mariya Gnedtchik, who has just started her career. That is not all, though. The third list of the IOC is on the way, making the rest of the athletes wait for their fate with bated breath.  
Does this arbitrariness look like a sport and how does it correlate with classic Olympic values? Could Pierre de Coubertin imagine this happening when he revived ancient games? Did he lay down such principles of the Olympic movement? These questions are rhetorical and, alas, they are not interesting to anyone at the IOC. And that is the key thing we need to realise today.

By Sergei Kanashits