Russia was banned from competing insports across the world following its invasion ofUkraine .- Putin aide Igor Levitin says the country should now return to a Soviet model of sporting competition.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus — which has acted as a staging ground for the invasion — were both banned from competing in international events by the governing bodies of myriad sports, including soccer, tennis, swimming, rugby, boxing, judo, and Formula One.
Some governing bodies, such as the International Swimming Federation (FINA), had initially said they would allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to continue to compete under a neutral flag, but later reversed the decision.
World Athletics indefinitely banned "all athletes, support personnel and officials" from Russia and Belarus from participating in any of its competitions, while the two nations were also ejected from the 2022 Beijing Paralympic Winter Games.
Speaking on the first day of a two-day sports forum in Moscow on Wednesday, Levitin, who is the vice-president of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), claimed that Russian sports need to once again become self-sufficient.
"Holding this forum is a very important event where sports industry workers can discuss the most pressing problems caused by the sanctions," said Levitin, per an Insider translation of a report from Russia's official state news agency TASS.
"The events of recent months show that there is no right and spirit in sports today. There are obvious violations of the Olympic Charter, which states the prohibition of any discrimination."
"All these infringements lead us to believe that we need to return to the origins of domestic sports, to the Soviet sport," Levitin added.
In the Soviet Union, sports were tightly controlled by the government and were used as a form of nationalist propaganda.
Many supposedly amateur athletes in the Soviet Union were in fact state-sponsored, leading to the state enjoying huge success at the Olympic Games. Between 1952 and 1988, the Soviet Union won a total of 1122 medals, which remains the second most of any nation in history.
Documents obtained by the New York Times in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system ahead of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, while an Australian study in 1989 claimed that at the 1980 Moscow Games, at which the Soviet Union won 195 medals, there was "hardly a medal winner" who "was not on one sort of drug or another."
"During the Soviet era, our sports experienced similar sanctions, but, in spite of everything, Soviet sports have always been at a high level," continued Levitin.
"At the present time, international sports are controlled not so much by officials as by advertising companies that manage our athletes.
"We need to return to the system that was in the Soviet Union, there is nothing wrong with that. This will bring us self-sufficiency."
Russian Sports Minister Oleg Matytsin reaffirmed Levitin's statements at the conference, saying that Russia and Belarus had already "developed a specific plan of action."
"We will also follow the rules established in sports, we will wait for relaxations, or we will focus on our own resources, and, using the Soviet experience, we will understand in which directions our sport should develop," he said.
"I think it's time to be more active, to shape our vision for the future of the community."
Translations by Oleksandr Vynogradov.