Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/WARSAW: Poland Sport and Tourism Minister Kamil Bortniczuk has said that up to 40 countries could boycott the Paris Olympics, which is likely to make the whole event pointless.
His comments came after Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia jointly rejected a plan of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow Belarusians and Russians to participate in the 2024 Olympics.
Ukraine threatened to boycott the Paris Olympics if that occurred with Belarus and Russian participation. But the IOC announced on Thursday that any boycott could only “punish athletes”.
Bortniczuk said that he believed it could be possible to build a coalition of forty countries, including Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, to support a block on the IOC’s program before a meeting on 10 February 2023.
Paris Olympics
He said, “considering this, I don’t think we could face tough decisions before the Olympics, and if we were to boycott the Paris Olympics, the coalition we could be a part of could be broad enough to make holding the Games pointless.”
The IOC announced the previous week that it could “explore a pathway” to allow Belarusian and Russian athletes to compete in Paris under a neutral flag, adding “no athlete should be prevented from competing just because of their passports”.
The move prompted condemnation, with the UK saying the plan was a “world away from the reality of war”.
