The Kremlin has issued nonsense about the IOC usurping the "right to sport"

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has criticized the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its president Thomas Bach for calling on national federations not to send athletes to the Friendship Games in Russia in September. A spokesman for dictator Vladimir Putin accused the organization of usurping power.

Peskov said this in a comment to the propaganda news agency TASS. The accomplice to Russia's war crimes in Ukraine repeated the Kremlin's traditional narrative of politicizing sports and also attributed the IOC's attempts to destroy the Olympic movement by sanctioning Russians.

"We cannot agree, of course, with Mr. Bach's attitude to Russia's plans to hold major sporting events, it is such a usurpation of the right to sport, the spirit of sport. It is unacceptable - unacceptable for anyone. The unwillingness of the International Olympic Committee's leadership to disassociate itself from politics is what causes the main damage to the Olympic movement," Peskov said.

Earlier, Olympic speed skating champion Svetlana Zhurova accused the IOC of humiliating Russians and treating them "like second-class citizens." And the head of the Russian Wrestling Federation, Mikhail Mamiashvili, called the IOC "a bunch of cultists, scoundrels, and fraudsters."

As OBOZ.UA reported, the day before it became known that Russian rowers refused to participate in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. And the Governor of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov ordered athletes from the occupied peninsula to refuse to travel to the French capital.

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