Taekwondo ETU European Olympic Qualifier 2024

LDOG · March 10, 2024

28 minutes ago, avlar said:

I am afraid we will have Gulag everywhere with this way.

Russians use core principles of democracy against us. Democracy needs voting. But it is important: who votes. If we look through the reports from the meetings of FIE (interhational fencing federation - one of the most pro-russian IF) we can see that russian position is supported during discussion by a lot of countries which do not have fencing traditions and rarelt send a lot of fencers to the international tournaments. Some of this national federations do not exist really - their contact e-mail boxes answer with something like "this address do not exist". But their votes are the same as the votes from others.

That is a general russian approach (in sports, politics e t.c.): they strengthen marginal groups (fat-rights, far-lefts, neo-nazi, nominal national sport federations e t.c.) to make their influence unproportionally high (with the help of money, media resources e t.c.). It undermines the result of the voting is which expected to represent balance of the oppinions. By the way, they used it in IPC to allow russians to take part in the Paralympics.

Let me show once again this famous photo from pro-war meeting with russian athletes. We can see that some of them have Z-s on their uniform and some of them do not have. So they at least had a choice - to were Z or not.

It's just that most countries supporting Russia or with a neutral stance are from the so called "global south" and, therefore, not powerhouses in fencing (which is largely an euro-usa-east asian sport), but they are not "marginal groups".

The outcome would probably be the same in most olympic sports but many of them have simply not submitted the matter to a vote and kept Russia banned by decision of their executive boards.

avlar · March 10, 2024

9 minutes ago, LDOG said:

It's just that most countries supporting Russia or with a neutral stance are from the so called "global south" and, therefore, not powerhouses in fencing (which is largely an euro-usa-east asian sport), but they are not "marginal groups".

The outcome would probably be the same in most olympic sports but many of them have simply not submitted the matter to a vote and kept Russia banned by decision of their executive boards.

I would not say that "global south" is not strong enough in fencing. There strong teams / fencers in South America, Africa, Central Asia.

It is more about cases when national federations exist nominally (with no answers to the requests sent at their offical contact - checked it myself). They even should not visit congresses themselves - FIE allowes them to transfer their votes to other National Federation. So, some federations have several votes at the meetings ) Of course, in some cases - the reason is to reduce expenditures, but it is not an excuse for the federations which do not really operate at all.