Dominik Hašek, who won gold with the Czech Republic team at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, said he is certain their presence at the Paris Games would otherwise result in “a huge promotion of the Russian war.”
PRAGUE — Russian and Belarusian athletes must state loud and clear they condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine or be banned from next year’s Paris Olympics, hockey gold medalist Dominik Hašek told The Associated Press.
“I’m convinced that we all, the whole democratic world, have to do all we can to prevent the Russian and Belarusian athletes from participating under the current conditions,” Hašek said. In exchange, democratic countries should be ready to offer them and their families asylum and safety. Hašek also floated the idea of creating team of refugees — a common practice at recent Olympics — because accepting them on Russia’s terms would signal approval of the invasion.
Hašek has been proposing the exclusion of the athletes since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022 and appealed particularly to the NHL and the two tennis tours in an open letter to take part in it. That has not happened. He proposed to Bettman that the NHL should pay off the contracts the Russian players signed as a way of banning them. Otherwise, he said, the NHL is partially responsible for what’s going on in Ukraine.
Hašek said tennis and other sports governing bodies accepting the Russians should do the same because “they support the Russian war.”Hašek said he personally is not in favor of boycotting the Paris Olympics because he doesn’t want to deprive the athletes of their Olympic dreams.He said the last chance to stop the Russians and “save a lot of lives” will be in the hands of France, noting that as host country it has the power to deny them entry.
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