The executive director of the Belarusian Sports Solidarity Fund, Alexander Opeikin, commented on the situation with Belarusian skiers Daria Dolidovich and Svetlana Andriyuk, who said that the country's authorities would not allow them to participate in the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing for supporting the opposition forces.

Dolidovich and Andriyuk were banned from participating in qualifying competitions for the Games, and they did not have the opportunity to qualify for the Olympics.

“This incident happened back in December, before the new year. In early December, there were discriminatory approaches from the Federation, but at first the problem was small. The skiers were not announced, but they did it themselves. And at the end of December, the Belarusian Ski Union deactivated the FIS (International Ski Federation) codes for athletes and excluded them from the international system. And these codes need to be restored very quickly, there are literally two days for this process. But the federation did everything just before the holidays, thereby effectively excluding the possibility for skiers to restore them.

We reacted then. We sent a complaint to FIS, but only now this episode has become resonant. FIS has this whole case, so you can contact them for comments. Both the FIS and the IOC must respond to this, because the topic is very discriminatory when athletes are removed from the starts for their political position.

Moreover, the athletes twice applied to the NOC of Belarus, but did not receive an answer. Our NOC generally performs only political functions, and does not react to complaints and violations of athletes' rights at all, ”Opeikin said in an interview.

Earlier, two skiers said that the Belarusian authorities would not let them go to the Olympic Games for supporting the opposition.

bbabo.Net