On Wednesday, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) had just announced that Russian and Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete under neutral flags at the Paralympics in Beijing, Thomas Bach said in a telephone switchboard with journalists from several news agencies that he had not met Vladimir Putin for years more spoken.

Christopher Becker

sports editor.

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Two days earlier, on Monday, the International Olympic Committee, of which Bach has been President for eight and a half years, had built the bridge to the Beijing Games for Russian and Belarusian Paralympians.

Despite the attacks that killed Ukrainian athletes this week.

Despite the fact that in Kyiv, an Olympic champion from 1996, Wladimir Klitschko, is helping his brother Vitali, Kiev's mayor, to organize resistance and everyday wartime life in a metropolis of three million.

In the face of the aggressive war of the man who has hosted, funded and pulled the strings of world sport for 15 years: Vladimir Putin.

The man Bach hasn't spoken to for years.

But we celebrated, chatted and toasted in Sochi 2014, with sparkling wine.

And during a coffee round, during which photos were taken that made viewers feel very uncomfortable at the time, given the Jacobs-Kronnation advertising idyll that Bach and Putin were broadcasting.

Blatter, Bach and the 2022 Putin

Putin courted the sports officials, ensnared them, flattered them, bought them after he, as prime minister, was responsible for countless civilian war casualties for the first time in 1999 with the military conquest of Grozny.

The officials were grateful to him, at the latest from 2007, when he brought the Winter Games to Sochi in Guatemala.

In 2010 he ended up in Zurich when FIFA offered him the 2018 World Cup.

Joseph Blatter, then President of the International Football Association, wrote in the “Weltwoche” that Putin was no longer “the same man” as the one with whom he had a “very friendly” relationship.

He wants to have as little to do with the 2022 Putin as Bach does.

Putin was, is and will remain Putin.

The man to whom they happily offered their events.

Who got his games in 2007 and in 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, went to war and stole South Ossetia from Georgia.

The Putin who called Bach on his cell phone just after the German was elected IOC President in 2013.

The Putin who annexed Crimea between the 2014 Olympics and Paralympics, without sanction from the IOC or FIFA.

The president whose state allowed people to be killed before the rockets hit Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, for example in the Tiergarten in the middle of Berlin.

The Putin who bombed Syria to keep Bashar al-Assad in office.

The Putin whose state doped athletes and betrayed the world for the glory of Russia, on whose behalf children are supposed to deliver medals, for example in figure skating, as if on an assembly line and without regard to their physical and mental health.

The Putin, for whom sport is an elementary part of his politics.

Whose policies at all times have coldly despised humanity.